Michael & Lindsay Tusk, Restaurateurs, Quince & Co.

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0:58Lindsay Tusk:When my friends, Johnny and Heather Ive, tell me to meet someone, I meet them. That's how I first connected to Chef Michael Tusk and his wife and partner, Lindsay Tusk. You all share so much, they said, the way you cook, the way you work, your values and your core belief that great food is about simplicity, quality of ingredients and happiness. Ruthie, you are going to love them. A few months ago, I was in San Francisco, and I saw this for myself at their beautiful and delicious restaurants Quince, Cotonia, and the wine bar Verjust. We immediately made a plan to get together in London and do Ruthie's Table 4 to carry on the conversation.

1:42Lindsay Tusk:So here we are on a beautiful spring day at the River Cafe, and that's what we're doing. And as always, the Ives were right. Well tell me, first of all, we had dinner here on Monday night. What have you been doing since? Where have you been? Have you eaten anywhere else? Have you walked around? Do you like London?

2:01Michael Tusk:Went to...

2:02Lindsay Tusk:Where did you meet?

2:02Michael Tusk:Braun last night. Oh, did you? Yeah. We also were at Mountain. The design was great. Wine selections, the food, just the whole vibe was great. And his fish soup is highly recommended. It was so concentrated in flavor. I worked in Provence my first time outside the United States for staging. Where was that? Oh, outside near Avignon. So I became kind of addicted to, didn't have a lot of money, but I could afford the soup de poisson at the time. And I'm a big fan of Rui, and then it reminded me back of the fireplace, the hearth at Chez Panisse. We had Alice Proud and Lulu Perrault at the time from Domaine Tapier.

2:46Lindsay Tusk:Yeah, yeah. And one of the chefs sent me down the street to pick wild fennel in somebody's yard in Berkeley.

2:53Michael Tusk:And then we cooked the soup in the fireplace in a beautiful copper pot. And then the thing I'll always remember is that she poached monkfish liver. Monkfish liver? Monkfish liver. And then she put that in the mortar and pestle for the rouille. Wow. And then, so anytime I'm making Rui, I'm trying to find monkfish liver.

3:17Lindsay Tusk:And you were at Berkeley studying? Third world development theory. Very, very different. Basically, it was socioeconomic studies of developing countries. But I would have had to gone on and continue to pursue a very academic career. But I'd always worked in restaurants. Had you, had you. yeah i'd always worried in restaurants whether it be hostessing or busing and um i think meeting mike we kind of thought we we kind of forged a point of view or perspective about hospitality and um the food that mike wanted to cook the table that i wanted to set the hospitality that i wanted there's such power in and seeing people people really want to be seen and i think if you see people you can give them so much confidence you can give them so much joy you can they can walk away lighter they can walk away joyous and for me it was important to also do it in a setting in an environment that was beautiful and so our restaurants i've been heavily um involved in all the design of the restaurants kind of the the art of the tabletop but creating beautiful environments is really important to me um and so this love story you met in san francisco well yes yes and berkeley in particular but it's funny this is the first time um we have never when we started our career we never really wanted to lean into the husband and wife relationship okay we don't have to no no no no no no so this is this is so nice it's a love story yeah i do think it is clearly our love language, being able to create these restaurants and feed people and take good care of people.

5:00Lindsay Tusk:I would just say that when I married Richard and I was very young, all he wanted me to do was to be an architect. I mean, literally, I mean, every day he would say, why did you go back to school and study architecture? There were about a million reasons. But instead, what we did was just, I worked in the office doing bits and pieces. And then when this opened, you know, we put it right here. So his office is five steps away. And he would call me up and say, come and look at a drawing and I'd say come and taste the soup but that relation not everybody likes that but there you are the two of you working together and creating something together and I you know well I think the greatest gift or what I'm most grateful about is being able to work with purpose because you know I could have you know take you know had a kind of a totally different career but for us it was about wanting to create something and having a point of view and a perspective that we wanted to share with people because we thought it was different and unique and that's how kind of quince came about in the early why did you call it quince now it was a host of reasons some really practical it's a beautiful name yeah it's a really beautiful yeah I love it yeah no thank you and I think Mike from an art history background like the queue and you saw quince and representative and many cultures as a fruit and the alchemy kind of having to do something to the fruit to make it delicious just because it's you know pretty acerbic in its raw form so um i think there was a kind of a greater metaphor about taking product in the kitchen cooking was it tough in the early days when you started was it a struggle or did it just yeah yeah because it was for us yeah yeah we definitely took

6:41Michael Tusk:the root of like all the money that you have kind of dip into some uh family but we were we were luckier since in those days you can max out credit cards you didn't need like what you need today to start a restaurant yeah now like we just you just have to kind of go for it and be fearless and that's what we did and like what year 2003 so it was really before the internet

7:10Lindsay Tusk:so you know that was the time when the food critics would still wait a month yeah for you to get your sea legs before they would come to the restaurant there was no open table there was no actually online platforms for reservations um so it was

7:23Michael Tusk:a really different it was a really analog time in a review in a newspaper or a magazine i remember pretty clearly we had uh we were prepared our bottega del vino wine glasses we had been going collecting janori you know we'd bring janori plates back in our luggage every time every time we visited like knowing that we're going to open a restaurant one day so so by the time we opened up we had all this stuff well i don't think we're nobody i think is fully prepared for for like opening a restaurant um but we were pretty fearless so we just kind of went for it i see

7:58Lindsay Tusk:lucky too you know and it was small was it we were so we when we opened this place we had nine tables and you know we did it for thirty thousand dollars and you know we went up rose went shopping for second-hand ovens. And, you know, it was really, really, really small. And very, you know, and I think now, as you say, what you have to go through to invest, to do, I mean, you still can. There are tiny restaurants in Hackney. People are doing, you know, small things. They're all different ways. So you started together. Was Italy an influence or was it more? Oh, without a doubt.

8:34Michael Tusk:Yeah. My first trip was going to Mila Romagna to Modena. since Paul Bertoli, who worked for Alice, and he ran the kitchen for 10 years at Shea. I worked with him. So he started taking me around, and first it was Modena, and then we were in Parma.

9:04Michael Tusk:Game night rush, or any night of the week, really, Genius keeps every order moving. From online ordering to your kitchen to the front counter. Big League reliability for any business. That's genius.

9:19Lindsay Tusk:You are a couple who work together, who cook together, and so you figure out, this is your recipe, so you figure out how you want to read it. If it's risotto, I'm definitely going to let Mike have it all to himself because it's the one thing I will say, in the years of owning the restaurant, It probably took about 10 years before Mike would let anyone else cook risotto. For 10 years, he stayed at the risotto station. Eventually, he felt comfortable turning it over somewhat. So we edited it a bit. If anybody's listening to this recipe, I think this comes from River Cafe 30.

9:57Michael Tusk:This recipe is zucchini and zucchini flour risotto. and it serves six and we have 18 torn zucchini flowers, six small zucchini, a liter of chicken stock, 150 grams of unsalted butter, two tablespoons of olive oil, finely chopped medium red onion, 300 grams of carnaroli rice 75 milliliters of vermouth and some parmigiano reggiano gratigiotto or grated some fresh basil to throw some italian in there so we slice the zucchini into this then we heat the olive oil on half the butter we fry the onion until it's soft then we add the rice and we stir. We add the vermouth and stir that until it's absorbed and then we're adding the hot stock and simmer, stirring until the rice has absorbed all the liquid, so ladle by ladle.

10:59Do you have any advice for that?

11:01Michael Tusk:When you're making a risotto and you're adding the stock

11:05Lindsay Tusk:and you have the rice and then you have the stock next to you and it's very hot, do you do it slower? Where do you follow those?

11:12Michael Tusk:No, I get very particular with the entire process. Definitely your stock, probably the most important element is simmering. It doesn't have to be like a raging boil, but sometimes you'll look at a cook and they either panic or they run out of some and they just don't have the ability to get the stock back up to temperature. So I use a timer, too, from the time that I toast the rice. I feel like the tostatora element, I go kind of like low and slow for like four or five minutes in the toasting. And then I think that takes the temperature a little bit down or the time period down. And then I think most of the common mistakes are like if you're adding, say, another element to it that's going to take the temperature down of the rice.

11:57Michael Tusk:I definitely want the rice to be at a certain temperature, but then I let it sit for like at least, you know, 30 seconds or so. and then I'll add, whether it's the parmigiano and the butter, I'll let it sit for like 30 seconds so it doesn't kind of break it. And then I'll stir it, and then that last flourish. I really feel like if you're not, there's nothing worse than getting a rice that is like not hot.

12:23Lindsay Tusk:I agree. Okay, are we finished? No, we have more to go.

12:26Michael Tusk:All right. We're adding the zucchini and the torn flours. and they were stirring in the remaining butter, the Parmigiano, Reggiano, and the basil leaves.

12:37Lindsay Tusk:Simple. Simple.

12:45Lindsay Tusk:I was born in Maine, a very, very, very northern Maine. Five more minutes and I would have been Canadian. Yeah, really right up against the border. But lived out of the country until I was about 10 years old. Moved back to the United States. So when you went out of the country, you went to Greece. We went to Greece. I remember you telling me that. Why? My father came from a nautical background, and he ran a shipyard for Olympic yachts in Greece for about 10 years. Yeah. So, yeah, it was a pretty great childhood. What do you remember? Okay, well, here's a good one, I think. Greek Easter, you know, Greek Orthodox Easter.

13:25Lindsay Tusk:The neighbors, we would all get together. you'd have a whole lamb and you'd put it on the spit outside in the backyard and then all the neighborhood kids had to take an hour like it was their turn to to turn the lamb on the spit and everybody had a you know slotted uh hour the best thing is the lamb fat the lamb skin so good with the salt and the oregano that's sort of crispy yeah that is just i think that it's one of the

13:53Michael Tusk:those like delicious bites you can ever have when we first met she spoke about this lamb

13:59Lindsay Tusk:all the time those french lamb that you have also in france i particularly had them there what are the the spring tiny baby tiny baby lamb i remember my baby was born in france who um we said okay we were coming home from the hospital i said i'll just stop at the butcher and get you know a leg of lamb and it weighed the same amount as baby i said i think i'll take it like three kilos i said maybe we'll have fish tonight you know it's a bit too close to home but those i i sort of slightly i absolutely love them now i'm not sure i have the same taste for them because they're a little bit too a little bit too young a little bit too delicate but they are still they're very very tiny and they're they're good but if you grew up in maine and then went to greece and then came back You grew up in?

14:48Michael Tusk:I grew up in New Jersey.

14:49Lindsay Tusk:Yeah. What was food like, your food memories of the early years?

14:55Michael Tusk:When I was a kid, before things started to change, there used to be like, you pick strawberry, you know, farms where you'd walk through and you can pick all your strawberries and eat them. A lot of dairy farms and the dairy was great. But my goal was always to, since I was about 30 minutes outside of Manhattan, my goal was always to, you know, I'd hear about a review in the New York Times of a restaurant, and that was the time. You showed out the restaurants, yeah. In that period, everything was French. It was all French words that I kept on hearing. And I'd see the reviews, and then they would, it was always like going out on the weekend for the big.

15:39Lindsay Tusk:What age was that? Teenager was it?

15:41Michael Tusk:later i remembered it from the time i was uh you know 10 or 12 years old and then we moved to

15:49Lindsay Tusk:michael tusk i'd like to book a table for one 12 good no i was very persistent that uh i would

15:56Michael Tusk:eventually make it to to these places with interesting french sounding names and then the good thing that was then they went out um we had a house where the stoves were a former pastry chef on the house. So it was like a double, it was a double unit, um, two grills flat top. And then it was from a pastry chef. So it was a pretty nice kitchen. So when the family did go away, I was able to find a cookbook and try to, you know, make like, so this is an early, early passion and early interest.

16:31Lindsay Tusk:Yeah.

16:31Michael Tusk:I love to eat. I think you have to, if you're going to be a chef and you have to have this love of like eating, eating and trying different things and, uh, or else he should go into a different profession. And then around 17 when I went to college, I moved to New Orleans and then that was like a whole new world of flavor.