So, You Want to Open A Restaurant? Drew Nieporent Tells All

Hey listeners, Chris Kimball here. Genevieve Taylor is coming to Milk Street Radio to answer your grilling questions. If you need new recipes or a bit of inspiration, we're here to help. Or you can try to stump me and Genevieve with your toughest grilling mysteries or food fights. Email us at questions at milkstreetradio.com. One more time, that's questions at milkstreetradio.com and we'll be in touch. This is Milk Street Radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Drew Nieperent has opened over 40 restaurants. He opened two of them, Nobu and Tribeca Grill, with Robert De Niro. I always said it's great to be a partner of Robert De Niro versus John Doe. You know, De Niro brought with him to Tribeca Grill, Sean Penn, Bill Murray, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Christopher Walkenhead Harris, have I dropped a few names. I mean, he brought all these people. So, yeah, it's way better to have a celebrity partner than not. Later on in the show, Drew tells us how he built some of New York's most iconic restaurants. But first, we're heading to the garden. Kevin West is a food writer, photographer, and also an expert gardener. He joins me now. Kevin, welcome to Milk Street. Hi, Chris. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. I have a confession to make, and maybe you can help me out here. I always had gardens. My mother had gardens, big gardens. I had gardens for most of my life. But when my mother got older in her 70s, she changed her strategy. She would do the survival of the fittest garden. So she'd take a quarter acre, she'd take a tractor and rototill it, throw in some composted cow manure from the farm next door, put down plastic, and just, punch out holes and put in tomato plants and everything. And then she'd basically ignore it. And she figured if 20% or 30% survived, that's okay because she had overplanted. So what do you say to people like me who've sort of been through the gauntlet of things? How could you get me back in? I think your book, The Cook's Garden, may do it for me. Get me back into a simpler starter garden that I can manage because that's what I need. I always overdo it. Well, I love what you just said. A simpler starter garden is the way to get going. And my advice is to start small. The even better advice, which I quote in the book from a farmer in my area called Elizabeth Keene. She told me that the best advice, in her opinion, is not to plan a garden based on how much space you have, but instead to plan a garden based on how much time you have. Because time is the most limited resource. And so the real question is, do you have a few minutes a day that you can give to a garden, a few hours a week that you can give to a garden, or do you really want to make it into a big summertime project? And that's the starting point. So take me through, I got a ton of questions for you, but take me through the world's simplest. Is this like a couple containers or something would be the beginning point? Yeah, I think the simplest garden is one where you're growing a few containers of herbs. The starting point is, for me, always herbs, because herbs give you so much the flavor of the garden in a very compact space, right? So you get the most bang for your buck, so to speak. And the reason I think it's so important to start small is that an overly big first garden is fatal to second gardens. You know, if you start small and you have a great experience and you just love that pot of basil, which you can use 25 times over the course of the summer, maybe that's going to start the gardening bug. And the next year you can do, let's say, a single raised bed of four feet by eight feet. And at that point, you actually are growing quite a bit of food. So what are some things that people think they should grow, but absolutely should not grow? What are some, I mean, like, I would never plant zucchini again if my life depended on it. So what are like five things not to plant? I would start with melons and cantaloupes, all of those great big things. They take a lot of sun and attention and care and space and water and good luck and everything else. So leave those to the farmers who have big fields. Cabbage. I love to eat cabbage. I love to grow cabbage, but it takes an awful long time and it takes a lot of space. I'm going to name sweet potatoes. In New England, there's the issue of heat and sun. We just don't have quite enough to really get the sweet potato to do what it wants to do, which is to store starch in its great big fat roots. You'd laid out a variety of thematic gardens, like a kid's garden. So give us a couple examples of ways of thinking about what to plan and making it interesting. Yeah, a big idea is you should grow your cuisine. Look at your favorite recipes, see what vegetables are in there, but then also see what else is supporting the flavor profile of the recipe. So it's not just the eggplant. It's also the basil. It's also the garlic. It's also, you know, some thyme, perhaps. And you can go through your recipes and really find your garden planting plan there in the recipes. Well, I guess one of the questions I have is, like garlic, for example, you know, why not just go buy your garlic in a store as opposed to tomatoes, where if you buy even Sun Golds in the store, they're not going to taste half as good as the ones you grow. So are there a few things other than tomatoes and herbs, obviously, other things that have a huge payoff because you can't get that flavor in a store? Yeah, and it's funny that you say garlic. I grow hardneck garlic. Softneck garlic has the advantage of storing very well. It keeps very well, so it's what's grown commercially for the most part. However, the hardneck garlics are distinguished more by their flavor. And some of those, such as Spanish Roja, are really just such delicious garlics. And I hear what you're saying about there's a kind of equation that we all have to solve for ourselves of, you know, is it worth the time? For me, garlic is one of those things that really is worth the time. Let's talk about cooking now. Roast chicken with burnt shallot juice. So I love this concept. Do you want to describe it? Yeah. So it's very simple. It is to cook your roast chicken in a very hot oven in a cast iron skillet with a couple of handfuls of shallots in the bottom of the cast iron skillet. And to me, cooking a roast chicken fast is the secret to getting a golden crispy skin and a good flavor. And it takes the shallots really just to the edge of being burnt. It maybe even pushes them over the edge of being burnt. But then you deglaze the pan with vermouth or wine or stock or whatever you happen to have handy. And it's the familiar roast chicken that you've had, but a little bit different. Tops, like beet tops, turnip tops, et cetera, radish tops. What are some of the things that everyone throws away they shouldn't throw away? Well, you've just named a couple. Radish tops are a great thing. Everyone eats the red radish and throws away the top. but the top is very similar to arugula. And like you're working to grow arugula in one part of the garden and then you're throwing away the radish tops from the other part of the garden. And it turns out, of course, that you can cook radishes and radish tops exactly as you would cook turnips and turnip tops. And it gives you something that is not only thrifty because you're getting essentially a second vegetable out of your radish, but it's also delicious. And braised and grilled lettuce, which I'm a big fan of too. So change our minds about how to cook lettuce. Yeah, I am a big fan of salad. And as you know, there's a reality of cooking from a garden, which is that sometimes you have a lot of stuff coming in at all at once. If you have six or eight heads of lettuce coming in one weekend, you got to figure out what to do with them because they're just not going to hold and you can't freeze them, right? And you can't make jam out of lettuce. So that's why I started looking at kind of old-fashioned recipes for cooked lettuce. So you take a head of lettuce, that's sort of a small compact head of lettuce, like a Boston lettuce or something like that, and you braise it very gently in butter and a little bit of stock. And there's a little bit of maybe diced shallot in there. And then you can sprinkle a little herb over the top when it's done. And it becomes a really delicious vegetable dish that is both springy, right? It both gives you that kind of fresh chlorophyll flavor of lettuce, but it also is comforting because it's warm. And there's also an outdoor grill version. I just cut it in half, oil it very lightly with grapeseed oil, and just throw it face down on the grill. That sounds excellent. How do you get from where we are now? It's sort of like the same question about cooking. How do you get from too few people cooking at home to everybody cooking at home? Same thing with gardening because I think they go hand in hand. And what is your, if you have, philosophy about getting people to spend more time growing food and cooking it themselves? Do you think that's hopeless? Do you think that's almost hopeless? Yeah, I don't think it's hopeless, Chris. And I think it has to be a hopeful prospect. Wendell Berry reminds us that eating is an agricultural act. And my corollary to that is that agriculture is a political act. and that growing food is a kind of activism. And what I mean by that is that growing food at home is a way to literally plant a seed for the future that you want to see. I think the reason that I fell in love with growing food is because I was really lucky to spend time in my grandparents' garden. And that experience of having delicious vegetables as a kid is really what set me on this path towards writing this book. So I guess if I look back at my own experience and say, listen, There's nothing really exceptional or extraordinary about my upbringing, except that I was lucky to have a taste of really wonderful food as a child. And that gave me something to always be moving towards as an adult. And I would love to be able to pass along that experience with other folks. Kevin, it's been a pleasure. You know, maybe I have to get rid of my mother's survival of the fittest garden and get back to starting with a few planters. But it certainly got me excited about going back into the garden. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And remember, Chris, what my mother used to say, which is that a seed wants to grow. Take care. That was Kevin West, author of The Cook's Garden. When I looked through Kevin's book, I was really struck by one of his recipes for roast chicken. So we adapted it here at Milk Street. You can find the recipe for skillet roasted chicken with burnt shallot jus at MilkStreetRadio.com. Now it's time to answer your baking questions with guest co-host Cheryl Day. Cheryl is the author of Cheryl Day's Treasury of Southern Baking. So, Cheryl, before we take a call, you get a lot of questions from people who make your recipes. do you get the same question all the time or people make a common mistake and even you after all these years kind of go like oh no not again here we go again so can I just pick one yeah just pick one yeah well let's see it may have to be more than one but under baking I just oh that just really gets me when I see a cookie or pie or biscuit and it doesn't even look cooked I like color on baked goods. And I'm just like, just a few more minutes in the oven would be great. Or let that pie start to bubble. I mean, I don't love over baking either, but for a pie or biscuit, you just want that good color. And yeah, that kind of, that kind of gets me. What about you? I do think though, a fair question. And one of my kids is a baker and asked me all the time, he's like, when is it done? I think that's the hardest thing to tell in baking. It's true. Because, you know, certain kind of cakes are different than other kinds of cakes and different than pies and different than bread. You can measure with temperature and et cetera. But it not easy because sometimes the sides pull away and sometimes the toothpick is not clean but sometimes you don want it to be clean Right I think that takes experience It definitely takes experience All right On that note let take a call Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, this is Jamila. How are you? Great. How can we help you today? Okay. So I make a sourdough. It's really fun, crusty. It's big. I do it in the Dutch oven and I like it. But I also want to know if there's a way to do sourdough that's more like a soft loaf that's easier to slice. It's not so crusty. Yeah. Do you, have you ever baked your sourdough in a Pullman pan? No, I have not. I've only ever done it free form, either like on a baking tray or in the Dutch oven. So I just discovered a recipe. There is a site that I love called The Perfect Loaf. He also has a cookbook, but he has a sourdough that is kind of a mashup of a milk bread and a sourdough. So you use the Tang Zong method in a Pullman pan. Are you familiar with that style of pan? It has like a lid that covers it. It's long. No. What happens is when you bake it, you cover it with this lid. It doesn't have like the kind of crust that you're accustomed to with your crusty sourdough. It's a very thin layer and it's very soft. And this mashup with the milk bread and the sourdough is absolutely delicious. Pullman pans, they cost, they're like just under $40. But it sounds like you bake a lot of bread. And I'm telling you, it makes the best, like a grilled cheese sandwich, you know, or sandwich bread. It's absolutely delicious. Chris, have you ever had any experience with? Yeah, I have a Pullman pan, but I make the same rustic bread you do, a boule, which is free form, but it has almost no fat in it. And that's why it's so rustic and craggy on the outside, et cetera, and crisp. You obviously just have to come up with a recipe that has fat in it. I've also made Japanese milk bread, which is my favorite bread in the world for sandwiches. It's outstanding. so for me when I want to do a sandwich bread I use a Japanese milk bread okay and you pre-cook some of the milk and other ingredients in a saucepan and then it sort of sets the texture in a way where you get this really amazing little not spongy texture but it's different than American white bread it's very tender okay but so that's why I love this method with the milk bread style and using your sourdough starter. Yeah. Yeah, so the recipe that's like the crossover recipe, does it use a huge amount of sourdough starter? I don't remember off the top of my head, but like I said, it's from a book called The Perfect Loaf, but he does have a website. Okay, I'm going to look up that recipe. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome. And try also, try a milk bread, just a standard milk bread. It's not hard to do, but it's really phenomenal. Okay, well, I'm going to give them both a try. Thanks. All right. Thanks for calling. Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye. This is Milk Street Radio. If you want to be a better baker, give us a ring, 855-426-9843. That's 855-426-9843. Or just email us at questions at MilkStreetRadio.com. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hey, this is John from Richmond, Virginia. Hi, John. What can we help you with? I have a very old memory of something that I ate and I've been trying to recreate it for about 25 years now. Okay, well I'm intrigued. Tell us what it is. It was a jalapeno cornbread. Okay. The place had a sort of a New Orleans theme, and the inside was creamy, almost reminded me of a bread pudding, and the crust was crisp, charred, and kind of caramelized on top. Well, first of all, this sounds delicious. And I love that it's such a great food memory for you. I will say in the South, where I'm from, we make something called cornbread pudding. Some folks call it corn souffle and some folks call it spoon corn. And it often does come with jalapenos. But the cornbread you're describing sounds like a delicious mashup of cornbread and corn pudding to me. Have you tried adding a little creamed corn in the recipe? My wife is actually convinced that it's a sort of spoon bread. And the closest that I've come is a recent time that I did add creamed corn. What was the top like? Charred and kind of caramelized in my memory and crunchy. What I would do is I would finish it in the broiler to get that sort of charred crust. And then you always want to make sure when you're using your pan that you butter it very well and you have it on high heat. To prevent any sticking, you'll put it in the oven first and then you pour your batter into that. But it sounds like you've kind of cracked the code. I guess one question I would have is, should I add any sort of butter or anything to the top to kind of help it get that memory I have of the caramelization? Well, I think that putting it under the broiler is going to get that crust and you're definitely going to put butter in the pan. Now, you certainly, I wouldn't be mad if you put a little melted butter on the top. Is the texture of this like cornbread? I mean, it's still a substantial bread? It's almost like a bread pudding. which makes the traditional cornbread very different. Yeah, so cornbread is typically very dry, but some people do a mush. But I find that creamed corn inside, you can even mix it with fresh corn if you have it in season, but that really does give you that pudding-like texture on the inside. Yeah. So, Chris, what do you think? I might make it a little more liquidy and maybe add some cream to it and maybe another egg. Yeah, definitely another egg. If you slightly undercook it, the center will be a little custardy. I'm still on the team of the creamed corn. That's smart. It's simple. Open the can. Add it. You're done. Yeah. It's the one time you can use creamed corn. I think it's the only thing you can use it for. Okay. I yield. Cheryl's right. Give that a chance. Yeah, and let us know. Thanks for your question, Jonathan. Thank you. Take care. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Hi, this is Lorian. Hi, Lorian. Where are you calling from? I'm in New Hampshire. How can we help you today? I love scones from a bakery that have chunks of white chocolate. But when I try to make them at home, the chocolate melts and it almost disappears into nothing. And I've tried using both white baking chips and chopped white chocolate bars. And the result is always the same. I've also used white chips in cookies, and they stay whole. So I'm wondering, is there something I need to do differently, or is there some other product I should be using? The bakeries managed to do it, so I'm hoping I can. So when you say they disappear completely, not just like a little melty gooey? No, they're almost disappearing into nothing. You know, like maybe there's a little bit of tan or something if they're on the outside. You can sort of see where it was. Well, there is a difference with how cookies and scones are baked. Scones are usually baked, I'm assuming yours are probably baked at a higher temperature than how you bake your cookies. Yes. But I would definitely recommend using the white chips rather than chopped chocolate. How big are the scones that you make? What temperature? How long are they in the oven? I think it might be 400, 425. And cookies you probably bake at like 325 or 350. So one thing that could be happening is since your scones are staying in longer in the oven at a higher temperature, that's going to melt. You might want to try kicking your oven down a little bit lower temperature. When's the last time you've calibrated your oven? because when we bake them at the bakery, I never have seen that where the actual chips melt. And you use the same kind of chips that you use for your cookies that you use for your scones? Yes. They're not technically white chocolate. You know, it's a white baking chip. Right. Which doesn't make sense that they would melt. What do you think, Chris? Well, what I would do is take the chips, throw them in the freezer the day before or an hour before. Good idea. And that's going to slow it down. You could also try freezing the shaped scones, too. But I think just freeze the chips. That would help. That's a great idea. I will say that at the bakery, we do bake our scones from frozen. Yeah, the recipe says you can put them in for a few minutes before you bake. And I guess I thought, well, what's the point of that? Maybe I should try it. They'll be nice and flaky, too. But I love Chris's idea of freezing the chips. Just keep them in the freezer. The only other thing I can think of is just using bigger chunks. So, you know, they're not going to disappear on you totally. That's the other possibility. But I think freezing them would be the first thing to test. Absolutely. Okay. Let us know. White chocolate and scones is not a bad idea. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks. Take care. Bye. You're listening to Oak Street Radio. Up next, the man who changed American restaurants. I'm Shilpa Oskakovic. And I'm Jazzy Sefcek. And we're the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. Jazzy and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on BonAppetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the BA Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking. This is Most Yet Radio. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. My next guest is Drew Nieperent. Over the last 40 years, he's opened some of New York's most storied restaurants, including Tribeca Grill and Nobu. His memoir is I'm Not Trying to be Difficult. Drew, welcome to Milk Street. Good to be here, man. Thanks. Someone said to you early on, I'm quoting, young man, this is a terrible business. It's impossible to work with the waiters. It's impossible to work with the chefs. Do not go into restaurants. That's probably still a good advice, but you managed to make a work. That person who told me that was Albert. His name was Albert Fogel. He owned two restaurants on 55th Street. And he was a very nice guy. And my dad would come into these restaurants. He'd say, eh, my son wants to be in the restaurant business. And they'd lecture me, like, get as far away from this business as possible. And it gave me resolve. Actually, the more they denigrated it, the more I wanted to do it. You've cooked yourself. You're a restaurateur. do you find the business side of it or the management side of it more interesting than just cooking food? Why be restaurateur? No. You know, first of all, when I opened my first restaurant, a restaurateur could be a restaurateur. And I differentiate what a restaurateur does and what a businessman does. Because in the restaurant business, there's a lot of business people who put money into restaurants. It's, hey, voila, they're restaurateurs. But a restaurateur for me was somebody who really worked in the business, you know, like came up through the ranks. But I always told people, I don't care about business. And I swear to you, I never once said, oh, if I do this, I'm going to make a lot of money. I just felt that if I opened a restaurant with good food and good service and got busy we would make money So you really began your career at Maxwell Plum back in the late 70s Yes At the time it was a legendary spot with a flamboyant decor, etc., etc. But I think a lot of people don't know really what it was. Maybe you could just explain Maxwell's Plum? Yeah, sure. I mean, Maxwell's, you know, there's nothing even remotely like it today. I mean, there were so many tchotchkes everywhere. Tiffany lamps and porcelain animals and live fire and, you know. Basically, Warnel Leroy, who was the son of Mervyn Leroy, who actually directed The Wizard of Oz, created this extraordinary restaurant. I mean, just then the menu had like 150 items. everything from chow yuck to couscous to turkey pot pie to you name it. It was on that menu. And the kitchen was tiny. I was going to ask you that. How did you manage 150 menu items with a tiny kitchen? I know. You know, when I look back on some of these places, because I tell you, I always ask when I'm in a restaurant to take a look at the kitchen because the size of the kitchen will tell me a lot. You know, a chef who has, you know, a dozen cooks, you know, of course he's going to be able to put little things on every plate and, you know, jazz it up. But the real efficiencies are around somebody who's got limited space, limited space to put plates down even. And then working around those logistics. To me, that's a real chef. You know, that to me is very important. But, you know, Maxwell's, you know, Warner did everything just based on instinct. He didn't really understand the restaurant business. So, you know, it was only later in my career, after I went to Spago, and I looked at Spago's menu, and it was 10 apps and 10 entrees. And I was like, that's all you need. So you're 29. You opened Mon Roche. So you – what did you figure out at that young age? What did you figure out about a restaurant that made it work? Yeah. The very basic thing I figured out was how badly most of these restaurants operated. What I mean by that is they were playing restaurant. You know, there was this whole dress codes and the menus most of the time were in French and the people didn't speak French. The wine lists were obviously very hard to navigate. So you know what I did? I just made it easy. When I opened Moorachet, I was like, the menu's in English. The prices are insane, meaning they were cheap. I had a $16 prefix menu. We got three stars from Brian Miller on, the date was June 7th, 1985, and I could have filled Shea Stadium. It was like winning the lottery, but without being able to collect the cash, it was extraordinary. But Maureche lasted 22 years because the whole point of Maureche was let's cut to the chase. Let's just give people great food at a low price, not even a reasonable price, a low price. A wine list that was decipherable and also affordable. So this was a – you can't beat this formula. But, you know, if this was a one-off, you'd go, well, this guy kind of got lucky. Yeah, I know. But that's not what happened. So De Niro, Tribeca Grill. So I guess my question is when you hook up with a major celebrity, that's a totally different situation than just some money people at your back. What are the good things about that? What are the bad things? Well, I always said it's great to be a partner of Robert De Niro versus John Doe. I mean the cachet that comes with Robert De Niro is extraordinary. And, you know, De Niro brought with him the Tribeca Grill, Sean Penn, Bill Murray, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Christopher Walkenhead Harris, have I dropped a few names? I mean, he brought all these people. And right at that time, Planet Hollywood with Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. And they opened Planet Hollywood, which was a joke. You know, it's to sell merchandise and jackets. It's, you know, so Mimi Sheridan, who was no longer reviewing restaurants for The New York Times, but had a newsletter. She wrote a great review of Tribeca Grill talking about how the food was the star, not the celebrities. And I think that's what happens. I mean, I think you need the celebrity to draw the attention of the journalists and the news media. But at the end of the day, you have to deliver the goods. And so the celebrity thing, yeah, it's way better, way better to have a celebrity partner than not. But if you just have a money partner, you're still running the show more or less. But I get the sense with De Niro that you were a junior partner in many respects and it was really, at the end of the day, his business. So do you give up control of your future? He stayed out of it completely. I can't even remember one thing. Maybe early on in the book I explained that he had this guy working for him. If I said white, he said black. Anything I said was wrong. But Bob stayed out of it because I think the guy's done like 90 or 100 movies. He was always working. Now, Nobu was a little bit different because I wanted to bring in certain people to invest. And he was like, no, no, it's just going to be me. Nobu, you, and Mayor Tepper was our Israeli partner. So it was like the Beatles. It was four of us. And then when that thing took off, that's when people get a little weird about the money. Like if Nobu's car wasn't ready one day, there were situations that had nothing to do with business. I'm not a concierge. But anyway, the thing that I want to make crystal clear, I'm still a partner with Robert De Niro. It's been over 35 years. And by and large, it's been a very good partnership. So you've had restaurants, as you said, Tribeca Grill last three and a half decades. What happens to restaurants when they have a long run and eventually close? Is that because times have changed? The restaurant hasn't? Is that just because of the economics? Are there all sorts of different reasons? Like Maxwell's Plum, you know, what happens to restaurants that are fabulously successful? Right. Well, New York used to embrace institutions. But look, I think a restaurant does have a cycle. Like Tribeca Grill, we lasted almost as long as Phantom of the Opera. Well, you're either in vogue or you fall out of vogue. You know, it's like sometimes you walk into a new restaurant and it's so brilliant, the design and the lighting, everything. And you go, oh, my God, I want to come here. And you don't even know what the food is. And you still want to go. So sometimes something has this extraordinary interior. It's going to last because just the patina of that in and of itself. Forget about the oysters and the prime rib and whatever. It's going to last. The only thing I will tell you, though, is Nobu is 31 years old. And it's pretty much the same from 1994 to the present. Why was Nobu so successful? Because the simplicity of the food. So Nobu, the menu is, I don't know if you experience this, but for me, when I go to a restaurant more than one or two times, I always order the same thing because there's always something on that menu that compelled me to come back, and it's usually one item. At Nobu, there's signature dishes. That's what happens. The people just order those signatures over and over and over again because they want those dishes. We used to think creativity was the whole ballgame and reinvent this and that, you know, nouvelle cuisine and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is the customer was tired of being a guinea pig. The customer wants what they want. They want the pasta bolognese. If you had to open another restaurant today, do you see an opening in the market like you did at the time, you know, all those years ago? Do you see a way forward for a new type of restaurant that might succeed? Very interesting. I see Jewish delis. The line at Katz's, I mean, it's unbelievable. You can't get near this place. You know, they got a shtick there. It's ridiculous. Carving meat by hand. And every guy carves it different. And you got to tip the guy. And guess what? A sandwich is now like 30 bucks. And the bread is terrible. The bread, the rye bread is like, oh, my God. So I would tell you a deli done with a certain, you know, efficiency with better bread. I would do that. But I'm not going to, I'm probably not going to do it. But I do see that opening, by the way. So it sounds from your descriptions that the restaurant business is very much a magic trick, right? You have a tiny little kitchen. You somehow take limited resources and a small number of people and turn it into a show. Right. So is that an old formula or is that still a formula that exists? No, no. That is extremely accurate. It boggles my mind. Like even now, when I go out for dinner, like we went to a place on Saturday. It was my son's birthday. He chose the place. Normally I choose the restaurant, but he chose the place. And it was packed at 6 o'clock. And I hate that. I was like, oh, my God, we're never going to get our food. You know, but the magic trick, and it is, is like when things just happen. You know, we ordered right away, which was good. And the food came out well, and, you know, it all worked. But it is a magic trick. It is. Joe, it's been, well, it's a little bit of memory lane. But I'm always interested in people who've been very successful in the restaurant business because it's a killer business. And there just aren't that many people who've really made it over a long period of time. I still have all my Cook's magazines. Well, there you go. And I still remember, you know, like you did the Who's Who. Oh, I remember 1983, yeah. Right. And then the Beard House took the Who's Who. They bought it. And in 1992, with Patricia Wells at Lincoln Center, I got the Who's Who Award. And for me, I think to this day, it's the greatest honor I've ever gotten because of getting it with Patricia Wells. But now they've discontinued this thing. No, they took it over and then they gave me a Who's Who Award, which was kind of weird. Well, you deserve it. You set the table, and I swear to you, it motivated me. So I'm not huge on awards, but you know what? It's nice to be recognized by your peers. Yeah, that's true. Well, we're both still standing. How about that? And I think that's my secret of success. God bless you. Drew, it's really been a pleasure. I really enjoyed this. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it. That was Drew Nieperent. His book is I'm Not Trying to Be Difficult, Stories from the Restaurant Trenches. I'm Christopher Kimball, and this is Milk Street Radio. Now let's head into the kitchen with Rose Hadabaugh to talk about this week's recipe, Mexican biscuits. Rose, how are you? Good, Chris. How are you? Good. As you know, I went to Mexico City recently. it's always the thing you didn't expect that is the most exciting thing you find somewhere. So I went to a bakery, Mac K, M-A-Q-U-E, which has more than one location. It was on a corner. It's a beautiful bakery. And they have, of course, you know, Mexican baking is amazing. But they had these biscuits I never seen before They were two or three times the size of a typical biscuit They were like three inches in diameter They were really high They were yellowish slightly sweet but they were halfway between a baking powder biscuit, which is what I grew up on, and a yeasted bread, you know, like you'd make for, let's say, a dinner party. So it was a little bit of both. And we came back and I couldn't get the recipe when I was there. We talked to the headquarters and they wouldn't give it to us. But the one thing I did know by asking around was it was a yeasted biscuit and a baking powder biscuit. It had two leaveners. So this was, what's the right term, a pain. It took like two months or so. I mean, this was really hard because the texture of a sort of dinner roll, American style dinner roll, combined with the sort of super tender fall apart texture of a biscuit, it would sort of be twisted between, and this was a challenge, right? It was a challenge, also because when you make a biscuit, you're not really working with it very much. It takes a few minutes to put the dough together, and then you throw it in the oven, but because this had the yeast and the baking powder, and we wanted that bread consistency, it was hard to kind of figure out what to change and what to keep, and one of the suggestions you had was to use bread flour, which gave it that structure to get the really tall biscuit and also give it that kind of bread quality. So that worked really well. And then just figuring out how much yeast to baking powder to give the right amount of lift and that still kind of incredible interior texture. Yeah, it's kind of an odd recipe. I mean, you start in a stand mixer like you would with a yeasted bread, but it's a very wet dough. You throw that in the fridge for half an hour so you can work with it. Then you roll it out, fold it like a letter, turn it, roll it out again, cut out biscuits, let them sit for an hour with a kitchen towel, and then put it in a hot oven for 12 minutes or so. But they come out, as I said, you know, half yeasted roll, half biscuit. That mixture is just absolutely magic. It's absolutely delicious. And they're huge too. Right. So it's a really tall biscuit and a very big biscuits. So we use a three-inch cutter, and then we use a smaller circular cutter to emboss the top of the biscuit to give it that biscuete look. That's very classic for this biscuit. And then we brush them with some egg white to get a really dark kind of burnished top, which is also what you saw and had. I love these biscuits. They are my favorite biscuits now. The only thing we didn't do is, I think, in some recipes in Mexico, they use food coloring, a little yellow food coloring, But they certainly were deeply sort of yellowish on the outside. I think ours, we took the sugar down a little bit, but it has a little sweetness to it. There is sugar in the recipe. Kudos to the kitchen. This was one of the hardest recipes we've ever done, but I think, in my mind, one of the most successful. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome. You can get the recipe from Mackey-style Mexican biscuits at MilkStreetRadio.com. You're listening to Milk Street Radio. Up next, a secret history of Italian home cooking. I'm Christopher Kimball, and you're listening to Milk Street Radio. The talisman of happiness has been ubiquitous in Italian kitchens since it was published back in 1929, but it's never been fully available in English, that is, until now. Michael Zerbin, and Raquel Pelzel from Voracious Books worked on bringing the full translation back to life, and they join me now. Michael, Raquel, welcome to Milk Street. Hi, thanks for having us, Chris. So glad to be here. Now, this is, we have to say, Michael is my editor at Little Brown for Milk Street, and Raquel used to work with me on Cook's Illustrated many lifetimes ago. So this is an interview among friends. So we're talking about a book that, Michael, you have been after for some time, The Talisman of Happiness. So what does it mean, Talisman of Happiness? Oh, isn't that the thing that we're all searching for? The Talisman of Happiness is a book written by a woman named Ada Boni, who was an Italian feminist pioneer. She was one of the first magazine editors who was a woman in Italy. And this book that she spent her entire life creating and reissuing over multiple editions was what she thought was the key to domestic bliss, a way for people and couples in particular to be able to bring happiness into their homes and live good lives. This is kind of the mother of all Italian home cooking books to come. Do you think that the recipes in this book bring the regions of Italy together in some sort of national cuisine? Well, you know, I think this is a book from a different time. Italy was barely Italy at the time that this book came out. It had just a few decades before Ada was born had unified itself out of many different kingdoms and cities. And Ada, recognizing that Italy was modernizing, that people's lives were changing, that relationships were changing, that the oral tradition of cooking was changing, she needed to document all of this stuff to be able to share all of this great treasure and to let people in different regions of Italy understand what was happening. If you were in Naples, say, maybe you would never had a dish from Sardinia or from Sicily. One of my favorite recipes from this book is the eggplant caponatina, which says it's eggplant Syracuse style in the translation. And it makes sense geographically. I mean, being close to North Africa, this has all kinds of interesting stuff that you would never find in the north of Italy. So I would say something like that is a regional recipe. But I think the magic of a book like this is that it's a mix and match. Yeah, I think that when Ada was putting the book together, I think her goal was to help newlyweds. You know, this is a book that was gifted to newlyweds for generations and also passed down from grandmother to granddaughter even. And as women and newlyweds were moving from their small villages or hometowns to city centers, you know, as industry took hold throughout the country, they wanted to be able to cook recipes that tasted like the food they grew up with. And they didn't have the benefit of having Nona by their side. So they turned to the talisman to teach them. And, you know, I think the person who perhaps is most famous for learning to cook from talisman is Marcella Hazan, who used these recipes to teach herself how to cook when she moved to America, all the dishes that she missed from home. So I really think it's about connection and bringing your family with you no matter where you come from. So she talks about, and you mentioned this a lot, a glass of something, which is, you know, which is Fannie Farmer's, a cup of something, right? And I went back and looked, are there a spoon? And I think during the 19th century, they started to standardize sizes, right? So a spoon was a very particular kind of spoon. So when you're dealing with a glass, in many recipes, it doesn't really matter exactly what size it is. But in some recipes, it might. So how do you figure that out when you say a half glass of cream, for example? You know, I am thinking back to the moments where at the office, Raquel and I face each other, our desks face each other. And I felt like I was a whack-a-mole popping up when we were both editing these chapters. We would pop up and go like, can you believe this? This is so ridiculous. Or, oh, my God, this sounds so good. How did I never know that this existed in Italian cooking? But for me, the thing I kept going like was, I got to find out what a freaking glass is. Like, you know, are we talking two ounces, 16 ounces? It led me down a rabbit hole into the Italian cooking subreddit on the Italian Reddit. And the consensus, I would say, from actual Italian cooks using these recipes is don't be suppressed about it, bro. Like, just, you know, start with a little. And if you think it needs more, then add a little bit more. Now, what about macaroni? Now, there's a cold macaroni salad. Let's talk about that. There are two things we've said. Spaghetti and meatballs never exist in Italy, and that's not true. And number two, cold pasta salads is just an American abomination, and yet she has cold macaroni salad. So could someone explain that one to me? You know, I think Otto was writing for the home. It was, what are you going to put on the table for your family? How are you going to feed each other? How are you going to share a wonderful time together? So it's not a restaurant book. I think that as you're reading the book, you come across these recipes that surprise you in that way and just make you smile like there's a macaroni and cheese, essentially. There's the pasta salad. Just all these moments that you're like, oh, they do this in Italy, too. Oh, I guess, you know, I guess I'm OK. It's home cooking. How do you think this book fits into the march of time as it goes to the cookbook publishing industry? I mean, it's never been out of print in Italy. So it's stood the march of time there for the past nearly a century. And I think it's a reference book to go back to. You know, we've all heard these stories and I have these moments in my life, and Chris, I'm sure you might as well, and Mike, where there's a dish that you loved so much and sadly someone passes away and the dish goes with them. And I think so many people can turn to this book as a way to discover or, you know, source something that they grew up with or they have a memory of or that they ate once. You know, Italian food is nostalgic and homey for I think almost everyone now. We all, you know, eat pasta, whether it's with an Italian sauce or another sauce. and I think we can all find a little bit of, you know, comfort here. Guys, it's been a pleasure, Raquel, Michael. Fabulous job. This sounds like one of those books that you just have to have. Thank you so much. Thanks, Chris. That was Michael Zerbin and Raquel Pelzel from Voracious Books, the publisher of The Talisman of Happiness. you can find all of our episodes at milkstreetradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts to explore milk street and everything we have to offer please go to 177milkstreet.com there you can become a member get full access to every recipe free standard shipping from the milk street store and more you can also find us on facebook at christopher kimball's milk street on instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions, and thanks, as always, for listening. Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio is produced by Milk Street, in association with GBH. Co-founder, Melissa Baldino. Executive Producer, Annie Sinzabaugh. Senior Editor, Melissa Allison. Senior Producer, Sarah Klack. Producer, Caroline Davis. Assistant Producer, Mari Orozco. Additional editing by Sydney Lewis. Audio mixing by Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Theme music by 2Bob Crew. Additional music by George Brendel Egglock. Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio is distributed by PRS. From PRX.