496: Samin Nosrat & Flynn McGarry

25:55It's a block of Velveeta cheese and a can of Rotel chilies. Is it Rotel salsa? I thought it was Rotel tomatoes with chilies. Yeah, and you put it in like a crock pot and it melts and it's like the yummiest cheesy tomatoey chili thing. It's so delicious. Also, I deeply love queso. I love any processed cheese thing. My friend invited me to go to this baseball game and sit in this like fancy booth with her. I don't even like baseball, but I was like, is there going to be nachos? It's one of the best food. And then the same friend a couple weeks later was like, do you want to come over for Fourth of July?

26:30I'm making hot dogs. I was like, will you have American cheese? And speaking of salt, like nacho, like the liquid cheese nachos, you need to have over salted chips, right? You have to have it. They're under salted. And then you're really thirsty and you're like, I'm going to drink some drink that's really bad for me. Yeah. Thank you, Samin, for being here. I appreciate it. Thank you, everybody.

27:00I wanted to ask you just about your age right away because you can't deny it. But I don't want this conversation to be focused on that because I've known you for a while and I think your food is as good as anyone. But I had to make that statement. It always needs to be said. It always needs to be said, but we're not going to dwell on it. Great. I watched your film, Chef Flynn. I think it's a cool documentary. It's coming out in theaters soon. It'll be on Hulu. But there's a scene in there where you're taking the subway in Los Angeles. You're taking the subway and you're going to Alma for your job.

27:33And this really crushed, I think will crush a lot of these perceptions that you're a quote-unquote rich kid from the hills of Hollywood. You're not. You're working at a restaurant and you're taking the subway in Los Angeles. Yeah. Well, I mean, the subway was mostly, like, my mom would drive me, but I was like, why does no one take? obviously no one takes the subway in LA but I was going to work during rush hour so I was like I lived kind of near it and I was like it was the perfect thing and it was cheap and it was like 20 minutes I still don't understand how many people don't take the subway in LA because literally it was like it would take me 20 minutes to take the subway or it would take me an hour and a half to drive and yeah I mean I was always working and that was always kind of what I did and to me though that was also sort of a way of having a little bit more freedom opposed like my mom having to drive me to work I had sort of the ability to kind of like go by myself especially when I couldn't drive yet yeah no but I just wanted to be said that like you you you're working Alma like you're working there yeah like it's like a job it wasn't like some weird like thing for the camera I was working there I mean I worked there for almost three years full-time and I mean sort of like I would stage places but I also always had in Los Angeles I always had like a job before that I was this place uh raised in Stark Bar for like a year and I was at Alma for three years and I would kind of pop out every once in a while to go work at a Madison Park or something and all the chefs were very kind of supportive of that they were um but always sort of when I was in Los Angeles had a full-time job and to be clear how old were you when you're working at Alma?

29:14I started when I was there when I was 14. So you're, you're homeschooled, right? Yeah. That's how you got, you're able to work a full-time job and do school. So you took like correspondence classes. Um, but what was that time like at Alma? I mean, what were you, what were you learning then? Were you, were you working the line busy Saturday night? Yeah. I mean, Alma to me was, that was like the place that I really sort of spent the most amount of time and learned not just like skills and things, but how to sort of work in a restaurant every single day. I went there and I started as the meat cook.

29:49And it was when Alma went from doing, like when they got Best New Restaurant from Bon Appetit, it was like you're doing a la carte, like 150 people a night. It's a very crazy time. Crazy busy place. And that's right when I came in there and came in as like the meat cook. And it was like, it was really the thing where it got thrown into like the craziness. I had worked a little bit kind of cooking meat before that, but I mean, it was like we had like five different proteins on the menu for 100 something people a night and learned how to like cook like elegant food in a very sort of fast paced restaurant like that.

30:25And then sort of would kind of they treated me sort of like the tour not in the restaurant. So I would kind of pop around every station. And if someone, as any restaurant, when there's kind of high staff turnover, I was always sort of like, oh, I kind of made it a point to know all the stations. And so I would go work pastry if I had to or sort of could hit every section. And I mean, to me, really, they learned about kind of that way of like every cook knew every station and kind of you need to know everything. Classic training, brigade style training, learning different steps in the kitchen. In the film, you say hype only gets you so far.

31:05I mean, you had a lot of hype around you with the New Yorker article, your first article when you were 13, I believe. And then you were on the cover of the New York Times magazine. And then there were plenty of thoughts about that. But then hype only gets you so far. What does that mean exactly to you? Well, I mean, I think especially in restaurants, it's like the literal thing is it gets people in the door. but then the second they're in the door, you have to actually deliver. That's why hype is, I think, great for a lot of reasons. It brings people to you. It's also bad for a lot of reasons because they come with preconceived notions and these sort of expectations.

31:47But it's a thing where no matter what they read, no matter how many things, they're in your hands in the restaurant, and you have to deliver. and I think it's the thing where people even, I've had this for so long where it's like they're reading about the young kid, whatever, and they might be coming because of that, but they still need to leave satisfied and full and have eaten a meal that was delicious and had great service and all of those things still need to happen regardless of how much or how little hype there is. Do you learn these fundamental skills at Alma or at EMP or is there like a time in your life when these skills all came together?

32:28I mean, it was really like everywhere. Yeah. I mean, and that's the way I wanted to learn. I wanted to not just go work in one place my entire time and only learn it there. I wanted to see the ways that they cook at EMP, the ways they cook at Alma, the ways that they cook in Scandinavia, like all these different kind of ways. And then I could, from there, knowing all these different techniques and mindsets towards it, then I could figure out what my food was. And so you really wanted to open in New York City, not in LA. And that was a conscious decision. You talk about it in the film quite a bit, and there's a little bit of a reference to pop-ups in New York, but there isn't, Gem is not open yet.

33:10So why do that to yourself? Because I feel like LA would be a slightly softer landing. You're well-known there. Obviously, it's a great food city. there's so much press there or people making the pilgrimage and you would have had a successful career there why go to new york which is like the opposite i mean i it's so insanely hard to have a restaurant here that i figured like this is the time to do that like to me the the first one i i'm as it has been proven very easily i'm not one to sort of ease into things i if i want to do something I want to fully do it and so to me it's sort of like I would rather have the first restaurant I have or the first few restaurants I have be in the hardest place to exist and and go through those experiences and deal with that kind of stuff and then everything else is easy it's like yeah everyone I know who you open in New York and then you're like everywhere else is so easy compared to this I would rather do that a hundred times over than work my way up to it I've never really thought that way career-wise I've always sort of thought like kind of throw yourself into the fire and like either you're going to succeed or you're going to fail and that's kind of what i love about new york is it's very like you can't just glide by you're no way you're either killing it or you fail and then you can go somewhere else i mean there's this fearlessness in you you see it in the film like and you do you do so much press before opening new york you do you do ted talks and you do you go around the world talking about what you represent and you're so calm and now then you move to new york and you open in new york in the toughest city I mean, is this like whole calmness?

34:46Is it just how you are? Or do you have this internal struggle all the time? I mean, I'm not going to say I'm entirely calm, but I think the great thing about working in restaurants is it really prepares you how to deal with stress and how to deal with pressure and all these things because the amount of stress and pressure that is on you on a daily basis as far as like everything getting done on time, Like this sort of, I mean, just restaurants are so stressful. And I mean, I've been doing that for so long now that it's sort of prepared me for like everything's easy. Like it's like the thing of like, yeah, like all talking interviews, all this kind of stuff could inherently be daunting.

35:29But it's like I have so many other things to worry about that it's like there's no world where that is like a stressful thing. It doesn't catch up to you. I mean, in the film, there are several scenes of you just hunched over a laptop looking at lists. Yeah. And that's like a theme all the time. Yeah. And it's just like you. So you're just saying, like, just to be clear, like in the restaurant world and especially having achieved such experience at such young age, it really gets you ready for life. Yeah. I mean, that was how I, like, my most formative years were spent in environments that were that kind of stressful and in places that were filled with pressure and all this kind of stuff.

36:10And that just prepared me for kind of the reality of it. I mean, definitely the opening a restaurant is a kind of different kind of set of skills and different pressures to have than just like being ready for service. But it's not so much that it taught me how to just about stress. It taught me how to deal with and process it and deal with it. And people and all that. And people and kind of – I definitely don't think that if I didn't work in kitchen so much at the same time as this, I would have been able to deal with it in such a kind of level-headed way. but I mean yeah the thing was like I was always focused on the food and dinners and the restaurants I was working in that while everything kind of was going on that would sort of fall in the back because like I could be doing an interview but I'm more stressed out like if the fish is going to be there that day and that's always sort of been the focus and so it kind of helps put everything in perspective.

37:12Speaking of reality I mean, you clearly recorded by reality shows, and you were coming up in an era when the celebrity chef in reality was actually more viable than now. I think it's kind of actually passed. But you said no to all reality shows, right? Yeah. And was that a hard decision? I mean, back then, good chefs were on Top Chef. Now, I don't really know. But was that tough? No. I mean, it's tempting. It's tempting when there's a lot of interest and people interested. But I've always been very aware of control and the image that I'm kind of putting out in the world. And the second that I met with someone and knew that these people were controlling the way that I'm presenting myself at such a young age in such an early point in my career that I didn't want to do that.

38:02because I knew that if I didn't have the control of how I was putting myself out there, that it could be kind of put in a completely different direction that I didn't want to go in. Yeah, and then it would be a soundbite and it'd be a cliche, and you're much more thoughtful than that. Let's talk about Jem. It's your mom, mother is Mag. It's her name spelled backwards. Who came up with that idea? That was actually my mom's idea. I love your mom. Your mom is great in the documentary. I think she's clearly such an inspiration to you, and she was like the manager of your pop-up when you were doing it at your house.

38:34What is her role now in the restaurant? She doesn't have one, which is, I think, the healthiest thing for everyone. Okay. I mean, she, yeah. Once I moved to New York, she kind of stepped out and she never was in the restaurant industry or wanted to be. She was just doing it to kind of help out. Helping her son out. And your sister, though, is involved, right? She's a partner of yours. She's the legal owner because I can't get a liquor license. Is she like working service, though? No, no. She signs things and sort of helps in that way, but on the service aspect, she isn't involved. And so when I had dinner there, you're young, but I noticed the rest of the staff is also pretty young.

39:11I mean, everyone's probably under the age of 30, I would guess. What's that like? I mean, that's not typical for New York. I mean, it's definitely a variety of ages typically when you walk into a restaurant. And I'm going to say a two-star New York Times restaurant, too. I actually need to say that again. Like, well-reviewed restaurant. Yeah, I mean, I wanted it to feel young. Like I could have went out and hired a bunch of ex-per-se people who are older and a little bit more boring. But people are coming for a tasting menu that's run by a young person. And because of that, I didn't want even people who had too much like Michelin star experience because I didn't want people who were so stuck in their ways.

39:55I wanted, we try to do different things in service and try to change, like we've had people who came from EMP and it didn't work out because they had this mindset that was instilled in them of how you should work service or how you should do this. And we're like, that's not how we want to do things. So it kind of made sense to have only kind of younger people who were more open to new things. And I mean, it definitely takes a little bit more training and a little bit more sort of being more hands on on my side. But I think that's it's all sort of worth it for. I think there's a really, truly unique thing that comes from a staff of people who are all very good at what they do, but also very youthful and not burnt out and excited about what they're doing and and passionate and kind of.

40:47Yeah, it was fun. It's an open kitchen. you can see everyone kind of being very focused and intense and you're very intense but then there's moments of levity and you're you're smiling and joking especially at the end i did the nine o 'clock seating so near the end of the day you're clearly having fun i mean but you are the boss right i mean there's moments when was the last time you had to really be the boss i mean it it happens in a very sort of casual way and i mean it is the thing where it's sort of like we i want people to have fun i want people to enjoy their jobs and i i want it to be a place where you like everyone you work with and everyone hangs out, but there's a certain point at which I have to reel people in every once in a while and try to do it in a very sort of respectful way.

41:29And I think it is this thing where it's like we can all enjoy ourselves because there is this overarching feeling. Everyone knows that what I say goes, and in the end of the day it's my decision, it's my restaurant, and we can have as much fun as we want as long as that continues to happen and as long as people continue to listen to that. and the second that that doesn't happen, then we don't have to have fun. And there's a lot of places that I've worked and the places that I really liked were not places that were completely serious all the time, but places that were serious when they needed to be serious and when everything was going well and everything, like if all the food's being done perfectly, if the service is being done well and everything's getting done on time, there's no reason to not talk to each other, to not enjoy yourselves or play music.

42:14Like that only makes you miserable. It feels like Noma is probably an example of that, where there's moments of intensity. And then, of course, Rene leads this kind of mad hat kind of style. Yeah. I mean, that was really like when I went to go work in Scandinavia, I worked at this place, Mimo, in Norway. And that, to me, was the closest version of a place, now a three Michelin star restaurant, where when I was there, it was a group of people who we all got everything done perfectly so we could have fun. Yeah. So we can enjoy ourselves, so we can talk all day, so we can hang out. But that can only happen if we were doing everything exactly how it should be.

42:51And if we weren't, there were days where things didn't get done. And it wasn't a fun day. But it also motivated you because it was sort of like having fun and enjoying your job. That's fine dining. You find people of like mind in that world. Yeah, exactly. But it was this thing where it was just like if everyone's doing their job well, we can have fun. And if they're not, then we're not going to have fun. And like that's the job. And like it's – to me, I've loved that mindset of just like it's – and it sounds weird, but kind of thinking of having fun as like a privilege of like being able to enjoy your job sort of is a privilege.

43:22You can go workplaces that are pretty miserable. And if you just do everything right and like do everything exactly how it's meant to be, we can have a great time and you can have all the freedom you want, the kind of creativity, but that can only happen if everything is done exactly how I want it. What was it like a geranium working there? Less fun? No, I mean, it was, it was very, it was similar. It was ran in a completely different way. Yeah. Mimo was four chef de partiz and like eight stages. Geranium was 20 chef de partiz. It overlooks the soccer stadium, right? It's a crazy place. I mean, it was a very interesting way that it was run because it was very like everyone was in charge of their own thing.

43:59And a very similar thing wherever it was fun. Like people were it was a great group of people and we would have fun in the daytime. But a very sort of different way of running a restaurant. I mean, it was, MIMO was this sort of small, like, still rough around the edges in ways. Like, our dry storage was five flights below the kitchen, only with stairs. And so there was this sort of, like, roughness to it. And I really, like, there, I was also at MIMO significantly longer. So I became a lot closer with everyone there. But geranium to me was, I mean, it was such a different style of cooking than I had.

44:36and that's why I went there because I didn't really want to go from Mimo to Noma, which are very similar to me food-wise. I wanted to go... Drainium is a little bit, it's stiffer. Yeah, but it's more technique-driven. It's more sort of classic. And I learned a ton there about how to make everything look perfect and the kind of techniques that go into it, which I found very fascinating, but in the end kind of was more drawn to places that were more sort of cooking. I don't think I cooked anything once at Drainium. It was a lot of molding and cutting and shaping. And at Mimo, they were like, you're cooking.

45:12I was making things and purees. And there was this sort of really flavor first. But I really loved seeing the kind of contrast. Those are great experiences. I want to talk about Jem and also your interest in beets. I know you did a Beat Wellington in the documentary early on. When you're 13, you're doing Beat Wellington, which is a fun play and I think has been probably copied many times. And then you're doing a 30-day aged beat in beeswax at Jem. Why are you so obsessed with beats? I kind of love this idea. Well, it's a very funny time for you to ask this because we literally took them off the menu last week.

45:50Oh, the aged beats? Yeah. Okay. I think it was this thing where, I mean, I've been doing beats on every single menu I've had for about maybe four years. And I think I'm over it. Yeah, dude. Well, I mean, it's not that I'm over it. It's that I really loved seeing the progression of it and seeing how working with one ingredient throughout seasons and throughout times and changing it and really kind of treating it. I love that. I love taking an ingredient and seeing how far you can stretch it. But sort of I feel like kind of at the end, we are trying to change it. And it was this thing where I was like, I was always sort of the beet dish, whatever.

46:33It would come. It would kind of just like happen. Like these ideas would just sort of randomly happen. And sort of towards the end felt like we were trying to force it in the menu. That's when you know it's time to. And that's when we got rid of it. And I think that's sort of the healthy thing with any quote unquote signature dish is the second that it feels forced into the menu because people want it or people are coming back for it is the second you shouldn't do it anymore. I like the way that your menu at Jem progresses with a lot of seafood and vegetables, and you really aren't going crazy with proteins.

47:05Is this intentional? Yeah, I mean, it comes from a lot of reasons. I mean, kind of the biggest one being I don't find meat interesting. Well, you told me after service I was setting up for this that, you know, when you eat beef and chicken and lamb and shellfish and pork in like a tasting, that's like when you think about it, that's fucking gross. Well, I mean, so those are the two reasons. The first reason is I find it very sort of like when you do serve meat, serve it as simply as possible because it's delicious. Inherently, meat is delicious. Everyone's well crave a steak. But also on the flip side of that, the amount of meals I've had where I have a foie course, a chicken course, a lamb course, a beef course, a duck course, you feel absolutely disgusting because no one is meant to mix that many proteins together.

47:54and it makes so much sense in your head of like why would you do this to your body and I think a big thing that we try to focus on that is something I don't think a lot of tasting meat restaurants focus on is not just the flavor or the progression of the meal but how you feel after you eat the meal because the amount of meals I've had ruined by how I felt after them because it's too much food or the food's too heavy and like yeah everything was delicious and incredible but you reach this point when you sort of start to hate it because you're so grossly full that you're kind of like resenting the next course before it even comes.

48:30Yeah, it's a shame that that's what we've kind of gone towards with tasty menus. But I do think that there's kind of a pushback, and like auto mix is a good example where you feel great afterwards even though there's a lot of food. I haven't been yet, but I want to go. What do you do for fun? Like, I mean, outside of your owning a business and running a restaurant, like, what do you do for fun? I mean currently have very little time to exist outside of the restaurant um I mean I really and it sounds like I really have we have fun at the restaurant like it's a really fun group of people and I think we really try to show that is that like I am friends with everyone we work with I work with and we have really fun together and it's it's a it's a lot of like everyone has this feeling of like we don't have time off so we might as well have fun at work I mean also like I get sort of one day off a week and I always make sure to go get dinner with a friend I mean that's something that when I first moved to New York I loved so much It's just like the act of going to a restaurant and having like a three hour dinner And unfortunately I can't do that because I'm providing that for people So I always make sure sort of like I have Sunday nights off And I always on a Sunday night will go just have like a nice long dinner Where have you gone recently?

49:44New York? Are some of your spots for these Sunday night dinners out? I go to Four Horsemen a lot in Brooklyn. I really just love that restaurant so much. It's just like a really chill place with incredible food. Frenchette recently. I mean, I sort of hit the same. I live right by the restaurant, so I go to Servos a lot down there. I wish Wild Air was open on Sundays. Yeah, I mean, like Estella. I sort of hit the same spots. Yeah, these are all spots that I feel like are similar in style and have really proficient and great execution, but have a really fun vibe. Exactly. I want to go somewhere that's a little bit more boisterous and a little bit fun and also get delicious food.

50:30I'm not trying to go to a Tasty Minute on my day off. I want to go somewhere that's fun, that has a great energy in the room, because that's what I love about New York restaurants. But also has incredible food and interesting food. who do you call when you're like in a pinch like do you have a mentor do you have like a role model in the in the food world on the chef world who helps you out i mean i i have a lot of really great friends who i call like i mean closest to mentor probably like i talked to from alma a lot about i think i mean i realize more and more how similar our restaurant is to to Alma in ways of, I mean, as it's Alma was Alma was like when Alma first opened and was a small sort of thing, like with not a ton of backers and trying to do something a little bit different.

51:20And the problems that I saw arising in that restaurant are the same ones we're dealing with. So sort of talking to someone who's been through that, I mean, is why I talked to him a lot. The guys from Contra and while they're really good friends of mine and very similar thing of like have have a small restaurant kind of similar to ours and are very young in the industry and um i talk to people like that a lot because i feel like they have the closest experience to what we're dealing with at the restaurant on a day-to-day basis opposed to talking to someone who opened the three million dollar restaurant and all these kind of things that it's they have such a different outlook on all these problems and stuff that goes either running downtown restaurants they've got similar problems exactly similar space issues purveyor issues those are great great great guys to talk to um we always ask this for our guests um if you were to have a cookbook out in the world spend a couple years writing it researching it etc what would it be what is a topic that you wish to write about i mean i've always thought if i do do a cookbook, which will probably happen one day.

52:31I don't want to write a cookbook because to me, reading all the gnome books, whatever else, no one's going to make that stuff. It's inherently just like you're not going to. What I do find interesting in all those books is the way that they talk about things, the way that the chefs think about things. And so if I were to do something, I'd want to make something that's a lot more sort of kind of visual focused and because that to me is such a big part of what we do um but also talking more about sort of the way that we think about things the way that we at the restaurant think about ingredients and think about cooking and why we do it not not just like showing you this is how we do all this stuff saying sort of like why we make things this way because i think that can be translated into a home a lot easier than a book for relay or something which i love that book so much like and i like Like that one to me was really interesting.

53:27But something that's sort of talking about like why chefs in restaurants like this think about ingredients this way and kind of how you can translate that in your day-to-day business. It's a noble cause. It's a tricky execution because you start talking about topics and it really goes over the head of most readers. So it would be a challenge, but I hope you can do that. That's why I'm putting that off for a while. Yeah, I know. I'm with it. Flynn McGarry, thanks for joining the Taste Podcast. Thanks for having me on.

53:59This is Taste is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.