Startle

Not really, no. In New York, when Craft first opened, it was a concept people couldn’t get their heads around. [Craft allows diners to create their own meal combinations.] It was, not that they didn’t get it, but it was just a very different thing. It really wasn’t though, because if you go to a steakhouse, that’s exactly how you order. You order your steak and you order your sides. We were doing the same thing. We just wrapped it up in a fine dining package in New York City and it was difficult for people to wrap their heads around.

We opened [Craftsteak] in Las Vegas and we called it a steakhouse. It was pretty much the same concept, but we call it a steakhouse. And guests think, “Oh, I get this, no problem.” And so we learned you have to package things correctly.

As a chef, people just won’t support you as much if you don’t live in that city. You really have to rely on tourists and things. Locals will not get behind you as much as they’ll get behind a local chef. And I understand that. It makes perfect sense. But, that said, the product is the same whether I’m there or not. It was Paul Bocuse who has a famous quote about this. When somebody asked him when he was traveling around, “Who’s cooking in your restaurant if you’re not there?” And his answer was, “The same people that are cooking when I’m there.” You train people.

Growing up in an Italian-American household, food was always very important, especially around holidays. And it was required that we were at the dinner table every night. I think also seeing the way that my mother showered love and affection on us was cooking, and you saw what food was able to do.

And then I kind of fell into it. I found that I liked doing it. It was something that I enjoyed, this idea of starting with raw ingredients and creating something. When I was a kid, I did model planes and model cars, I think for the same reason. You get a bunch of parts and you put them together, and you have something. And that’s what cooking was. It was taking these ingredients and putting them together and making something, and then sometimes it tasted great and sometimes not. And you kind of worked on why. But it came very easy to me and I’m not sure why.

And so I was hooked from the very beginning. And I threw myself into it. I mean, I read everything I could possibly read, every magazine I could read, every book I could get my hands on about cooking, about food. I think I was much more up on what was going on back then than I am now. But it just became a passion at a very young age, with no intention at all of making a career out of it until my father suggested that I think about becoming a chef.

Around my friends I didn’t even talk about it. It was something I kind of did on my own. I was a closet cook, I guess. And then my father suggested that I started working in restaurants. We had a family friend and he got me a job at one of the local restaurants. And I found that not only did I love food, but I loved the atmosphere of the kitchen and the spirit in the kitchen. You had these guys and gals who would just come together every night to produce food. And I just loved the environment and loved what I was doing. It’s easy to be passionate about something when you love it. It’s not work.

It’s contemporary American, but there are definitely influences from France, from the time I spent there, and from Italy. But I think contemporary cooking — whether you’re doing it in the States, whether you’re doing it in Spain or Italy or France — is pretty much the same. It’s new techniques, sort of cleaner methods of cooking. But I think that for 20-plus years now I’ve been focused on buying from farmers, and these are all buzzwords you hear now, “farm to table.” A group of us, we don’t even market it because we feel that if you’re coming to a restaurant of this caliber you should expect that. So I call it contemporary American with world influences.

Service is extremely important in a restaurant. I always say that people will come to the restaurant for food, but they’ll come back for service. The number one reason someone comes back to a restaurant is recognition. I don’t care who you are, there’s always that moment when you walk into a restaurant and wonder, do they have my reservation? You think, “Please, they have to have it. I can’t go through this.”

And then you walk in and they say, “Hi, Mr. Smith, welcome back.” It’s over. You’re there. You’re there for life.

I think that service can be broken down into two things. There’s service, which is all the nuts and bolts around service — clearing and serving from the right side of the guest, making sure wine’s filled at the proper level, water is filled at the proper level, wine comes at the proper time, making sure that the silver is on the table for the correct course. Those are all the mechanics of service. But then there’s the other side of it, and that’s the hospitality side of it. And I think most of the time when people mention service, they’re talking about hospitality. I’ve been to restaurants where the service has been excellent and the hospitality is terrible.

You may look at that and say, “I didn’t like the service. It was stuffy,” or whatever. It’s the hospitality that they’re not getting. When a restaurant gets it right, they’re doing all those steps correctly plus they have the hospitality down. The hospitality side of it is the way that you’re treated, the way that you’re welcomed to a restaurant, the way you’re said goodbye to at a restaurant. It’s the reason why you’re going to make a decision to come back to this restaurant and spend your money again — because you felt good about the experience. You were happy when you left. That usually happens through great hospitality.

Mushrooms. I think a mushroom is as close as you can get to eating dirt, and so it kind of brings you back to, right to the earth, right to your roots. And that’s why I love it. You taste the mushroom, and you taste the dirt that it sort of comes up in, if it’s a wild mushroom. Cultivated mushrooms — a different story. They’re not raised in dirt. Beets have that same quality. You taste the earth. And to me, I guess that’s important for some reason.

I’m looking for the purity of flavor. Years ago, when I was at Gramercy [Gramercy Tavern in New York] still, I had a woman complain. So I called her up. I said, “I’m sorry you didn’t like the experience here, but can you tell me what happened?” And she said, “We had a salmon dish and it tasted just like salmon.” I said, “Okay.” And she said, “We had this baby lamb dish and you had all the different parts, but it was just like lamb. And the chocolate soufflé was bitter.”

And I said, “Normally I would tell you to come back and try to change this experience, but I want my salmon to taste like salmon. I want my lamb to taste lamb, and chocolate happens to be bitter. So I can’t help you. I’ll refund your money.”

That was the biggest compliment someone could pay me: that my salmon tastes like salmon and my lamb tastes like lamb. I think our food should taste exactly of what it is. When you taste a beet, you should taste it and go, “Oh yeah, that’s a beet.” And so, yeah, that’s what I’m looking to do, just really get to the essence of a particular ingredient. Again, it’s purity. When you go through the trouble of sourcing great ingredients that are really fresh and wholesome, I think that the flavor should come through. Your job as a chef or as a cook is to bring those flavors out, not to push them away.

I started boxing about 2 years ago. I met a trainer at a fight who just happened to be into food and he invited me into the gym. I was a fight fan my whole life. I went to the gym not expecting I would ever spar. I thought I would just go there and work out and try to get in shape. And one thing led to another, and now I’m there religiously three days a week. There’s so much technique involved. There is a science behind it. Obviously conditioning comes into I — three minutes feels like an hour when you’re in there.

Culturally, they’re the same. And you want it to be the same. The culture of taking care of our employees is number one. We feel that if you don’t take care of your employees, how can you possibly take care of guests? We like to take care of our environment. That’s why we buy as much food as we can that’s organic or from local farmers. We also like to support local farmers because if they’re not being supported, that way of life will disappear and all we’ll have are factory farms.

You want to create the environment where it’s fun for the employees who are working here. You have to keep them motivated. Every day we open wine and taste wine with our staff. We go through the sight, we go through the smell, we go through the taste. They’re going to walk away knowing wine and understanding wine and understanding food and understanding how they go together — these are things that we’re focused on with our staff. And so you try to make that fun. You try to keep everybody involved, and I think that culture will translate to the customer experience. If you’re treating your staff and you’re teaching your staff, they really have no choice because they’re so excited about it that it will transfer over to the guest experience.

My personality is me. I don’t try to alter myself at all. Very early on, I figured out that the most important thing that we can do as judges is to have a serious conversation, a real conversation about food. As a viewer, you’re not going to taste, and the only way to experience it is through our conversation. And so we don’t need someone to sit there and have these buzzwords, and sort go after the chefs and make them feel terrible. This is a serious food conversation.

We both do. I cook a lot at home but it’s very, very simple. I can throw something together, a few ingredients in 10 minutes, and come up with a pasta dish. My wife cooks. She actually cooks a lot for the baby, too, which is great to see. But we both do. Not together, though. It’s either she cooks or I cook. Together it doesn’t work. The kitchen’s too small at home.