715: Do You Really Know Rick Bayless?

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0:31My menu descriptions, I tried to bring the dishes alive for people. Right now, we are in a phase of menu writing where it says pork tenderloin. Austere. It's so austere. I hate it. It throws three adjectives down. And you go, it's like, what am I getting here? I don't know. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

1:22Chicago and his life in and out of the kitchen. It was so great catching up with Rick, and I hope you enjoy this episode.

1:32Rick Bayless, welcome to This is Taste. How are you? I am great and very happy to be here. It's thrilling to have you on. I am such a fan of your work, of your cookbooks, your restaurants. Thank you. You hosted me on your own podcast long ago. Are you going to bring it back? We've talked about it several times and we'll see if we can do it. You know, we did it for five years and then we decided to take a break from it. And because my co-host, Steve Dolinsky, was kind of going another way and he's really focused so much on pizza now, which is something delicious to focus on. The Hungry Hound, the legend in the game.

2:11Yes. Steve Dolinsky. I love the chemistry that you guys had. It was a really good show. I just I've always wanted to have you into the studio. You know, growing up in West Michigan, I got to go to Frontier Grill when I was 14. Oh, really? Yeah, in like the 90s. This was like 1994. And this is the first time I ever had salsa that wasn't red. First time I saw guacamole ever made outside of using a potato masher. And I just really publicly want to thank you for introducing me to Mexican cuisine. Thank you very much for saying that. No, it's so true. And we'll get into some of your history. I have a lot of questions.

2:49And I want to know, you know, when you come to New York, I know you're here, you know, a few times a year. Where do you like to go out? Do you have any restaurants that come to mind? Well, I'm sort of a traditionalist. And so I tend to go back to places that I have been to before that are sort of holding it. I mean, we have a restaurant that just turned 38 years old. So we kind of like that tradition and the longevity of restaurants. So last night after the big event that I was here to do with the fundraiser for CCAP, we went to the original Blue Ribbon. And I will say I hadn't been there in probably 15 years and it was just as good as ever.

3:33And I love to see that kind of thing. Amazing. I mean, Blue Ribbon keeps bringing in the chefs. Yeah. We know Luder. No, absolutely. It's a chef hang and it's still to this date. And it's open late and you can get really good food late. And that's sort of more the exception than the rule these days. I like checking out new places, but I'll still go back and eat oysters at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. Yes. It's like that's a great place to go. And it's been going on for much longer than our restaurants. Don't sleep on that place. I mean, it is in a very busy part of New York. Yes. Grand Central Orch's Bar doesn't get talked about enough.

4:11It's incredible. Yeah, I agree. They pull that off every single day with that daily menu. Yes, exactly. Rick, you know, many of our listeners know you from television and from cookbooks, maybe don't know your restaurant work. You know, you mentioned 38 years of Frontera Grill. But just let us, like, for the listener, what are your restaurants right now? Let's go over a few of them. So we have four restaurants that are all together on Clark Street in River North in Chicago. The original one is Frontera Grill. We opened that in 87. And then in 89, we opened up the fine dining place next to it, Topolobampo.

4:49So that one's been going for a long time, too. And since the Michelin stars have come to Chicago, we have held a star. And we're very proud of that part of it. And then we have next door to the fine dining place, we have a place called Shoko that really focuses on simpler fare. The real focus is tortas, so Mexican sandwiches. And we have a big wood burning oven and the meats are cooked in the wood burning oven and the bread is toasted there. And then we do caldos, meal in a bowl soups and things like pozole. On the weekends, we do menudo. We do a special caldo all the time. We have a small section of tacos, but it's not a taqueria.

5:33And then we do fresh fried churros. That's my thing. I love, I personally love any fried dough. And so when we started putting that place together, I have this really favorite place in Mexico City called Churreria El Moro. And it's been going since the 30s, I believe. And it's open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And all they do is fry churros. You stand in line, You get the ones just out of the hot fat and hot chocolate. And it's an amazing place. And I wanted to capture a bit of that. And one of my favorite experiences was that the great-grandchildren of the people that started Churriri El Moro came to Xoco, our place that does churros, and ate the churros and said, oh, these are very much like home.

6:27That made me so happy. It's an incredible story that you do your own version of El Moro. You know, Liza and I get to go to El Moro in Orange County. Oh, is that right? They have a little pop-up location, permanent location in this beautiful market. And when you do fresh turros versus, you know, the other guys, there's nothing like it. There's nothing like it. And I mean, donuts you can like fry and they'll hold for quite a while. But not churros. They change their texture, and they're not nearly as satisfying to me if they're not still warm. Rick, let's go back to 1981. You moved to Mexico where you lived for five years.

7:06You visited all the regions. And just for a listener who maybe don't know this background, why did you move to Mexico? And what was the instinct to really travel around and learn the cuisine, speaking the language? Right. My family said the same thing. Why are you moving to Mexico? But we moved to Mexico, my wife and I, in 81, because I had had this wonderful opportunity in a small public television station to do a 26-part series on the foods of Mexico. Now, I did my undergraduate degree in Spanish language and literature. And I will say that in that time, I was just wild about Mexican culture.

7:54I lived in Mexico and I had the opportunity to start to get my feet wet with what real Mexican culture is like. Now, I wasn't really focused on food. I mean, I was always focused on food in some way. But that wasn't your reason for going was not food. It was not. It was culture. It was culture and language. And I grew up in a restaurant. I grew up in a barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma City. And the whole family was focused on food. And I thought every family was focused on food. So wherever I traveled, I had the opportunity to kind of delve into the food a little bit. But that was not my main focus.

8:30But I had, when I started, I was in graduate school. And I was focused on anthropology and linguistics. So you can see, again, that language thing comes back up. And when I got all the way through for a Ph.D., I accept my dissertation, and the guy that I went to study with decided to take early retirement. And I was devastated. I didn't know what I was going to do. And I had gotten sort of more interested in food during my graduate school days and started teaching cooking classes. And so I said, I'm just going to take a year off and I'm just going to teach cooking classes. I was very successful with that.

9:13I got this TV series, which kind of came out of the blue, and it gave me the opportunity to go back to Mexico and really focus on food. And then I decided what I really wanted to do was write a cookbook on the regional foods of Mexico. And that's when I moved. That was a very long answer to a very short question. From February 20th to March 7th, dive into Canada's biggest culinary festival, Montreal en Lumière, an exclusive partnership with the McCord Stewart Museum and its exhibition, On the Menu Montreal, a restaurant story. the 2026 festival invites food lovers on a flavorful journey through time.

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12:01For a limited time, get 40 % off your first box, Plus, get a free item in your box for life. Go to hungryroot.com slash thisistaste and use code thisistaste. That's hungryroot.com slash thisistaste, code thisistaste, to get 40 % off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Let's go back to the opening of Frontera Grill 38 years ago. On your website, which is a really great timeline of your career, kind of an interactive timeline, really cool. But you have a photo of the opening menu of Frontera Grill, and I love it. There's turkey breast with red mole. There's chili reno. There's red mole chicken enchiladas.

12:45There's Mexican sparkling water on the menu. Right, right. A long time ago before it was everywhere. Before it was everywhere and extremely cool. Yeah. I want to reflect 38 years ago on this opening because in Chicago and probably in New York, there weren't restaurants serving the style of Mexican cuisine. What were you doing with the opening of Frontera? I really wanted to shine a spotlight on regional food because I said Mexico is our next door neighbor and we don't even people could talk about regions of Italy and regions of China, but they couldn't talk about regions of Mexico. And I just didn't understand why.

13:20So I set out. Our mission was to really put a spotlight on the regions and how different the flavors are in different parts of Mexico. So each menu, and back in those days, we changed the menu almost completely every week. And that was quite an endeavor. But we made it through. When we opened Topolobampo, the fine dining place, we went to every two weeks, we changed the menu. And when I said we changed it, we changed all but about four dishes on the menu. So that first opening menu was totally flipped within a week. Within a week, yeah. That's incredible. Yeah. I mean, what was the response like?

14:00Like, be honest. I mean, this is a brand new idea for Chicago. And I cannot imagine 38 years ago, I mean, lived in the Midwest. Not the most adventurous dining town. It wasn't, but more adventurous than you would think. Okay. And a lot of people think that the Chicago diner doesn't like spice, but we found just the opposite. Most of the complaints we got was our food wasn't spicy enough. And I was like, but the food in Mexico is not particularly spicy, not compared to Indian food or Thai food. Mexican is pretty accessible from the spice level. What a lot of people don't know is that Mexico, excuse me, that Chicago has the second largest Mexican population in the country.

14:44And it did in 1987. This is not something that's new. And the first customers that we had come into our restaurant, sat down, it was a party of four. They opened the menus, they looked at the menus, they closed them, got up, and looked at the waiter and said, this isn't Mexican food, you'll be out of business within six months. Well, 38 years later, we have proven them that that was not true. But what we found, because our first cookbook was published the same day that we opened the restaurant, we got a whole lot of press on that book. And it told people that we knew what we were doing, that we were not making this stuff up, that we had actually spent those five years researching in Mexico, packed it into a book, and we had some authority.

15:40and that is, I think, what saved us because within six weeks, we hit our six-month projections of what we wanted to grow to and by six months, we were kind of off the charts and it was very successful from day one, I think for a couple of reasons. One is that I think I'm a pretty good cook and so I think that I was able to make food that tasted really good. Second, I grew up in a restaurant. I knew what it was like to make food for sale. Yeah, P &Ls were in your blood. They absolutely were. I understood the whole process. And the third thing is that I think that I know how to talk about food to an audience that doesn't necessarily know what they're getting, okay?

16:32And so my menu descriptions, I tried to bring the dishes alive for people. Right now, we are in a phase of menu writing where it says pork tenderloin. Austere. It's so austere. I hate it. It throws three adjectives down. And you go, it's like, what am I getting here? I don't know. But I would write more floury descriptions of the dish to try to make people comfortable with it. And that, I think, was one of the things that stood us in good stead. It's also reassuring when it's in the handwriting, too. Yeah. Like I love, I mean, obviously pre-computers, you're handwriting your menus. So when you have a little bit of a story, it's nice.

17:11I love that sentiment. I fully agree. The three or four ingredient menu descriptor needs to go, needs to go. I would kind of agree with that because I think it makes a lot of chefs feel very like, oh, whatever I put out on the plate's going to be wonderful. So I'm just going to throw out these random descriptions of a dish. but I will say that one of the things that I've always done is to cook the food I want to cook but cook it for our guests meaning that I wanted them to have the most amazing experience that they could have in our restaurant and for me I knew that I had to hold their hand through that experience I want to go back to the opening of Frontera I mean Rick it's like a master stroke of marketing you've got your TV show you've got your cookbook and then you launch a restaurant, basically at the same time the TV show came first.

18:07Like, where did that come from? It was total random luck. You know that you can't really predict when a cookbook is going to come out. Or a restaurant. Or a restaurant, right? It's very, very hard. And for some reason, fate had us have that book published on the same day we opened our restaurant. Yeah, yeah, and you got a bunch of media. I mean, was there like an Oprah Winfrey factor at some point in your career? No, we never had that. Oprah didn't take to us very much. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's fair. I mean, she has her favorites. Very late in my career, right? I think it was one of her last shows.

18:44It was kind of a weird thing, but she was doing something with some people that wanted me to come and cook. And so I actually got to be on the show one time, but it was very late in my career and in Oprah's. Yeah, I mean, well, not really your career. Your career is like still like flourishing. Well, thank you. Well, so is Oprah's bed, you know. Well, maybe not. But like, I just think like, you know, late to the party, Oprah, you should have been going down to, you should have been going down to Frontera. The place is amazing. I want to ask you a little bit about how you currently split your time between Chicago and Mexico because it's an ever evolving.

19:20My sense is that it's always evolving, right? Your relationship with this country of such a deep heritage and regions. So how do you spend your time in Mexico and in Chicago? When I was living in Mexico during the 80s, there was not one chef-owned restaurant that I knew. Okay. And when people talked about traditional food, they talked about these restaurants that had been around for a long time. And the kitchens were run by Mayores. Those are the older women that have done their internships from very young age and now direct these kitchens that were very classic. And their names were never on the menus.

20:04OK. And nobody talked about, oh, we're going to go to Chef So-and-So's restaurant. And I was kind of incensed by that. And so I wanted to put the spotlight on the people who were actually doing the work and were upholding the traditions. And you find that in the famous street stalls and all that sort of stuff. People hardly ever talked or used to, people hardly ever talked about who the people were. They talked about the food only. So when I came back to Chicago or when I came to Chicago and decided to open the restaurant, I wanted to really focus on traditional cooking. and over the years, I think, and this is kind of my hypothesis, but it's not proven, that things changed in Mexico a lot.

20:59And a whole lot of people who grew up in wealthy families that had full-time cooks and a grandmother that sort of ran the house, that era kind of came to an end. Fewer full-time cooks in homes. Grandma passed away. The kids realized that they hadn't learned the dishes from grandmother or the cook and that they needed to somehow go back and preserve all of that. So we have a huge generation now of young chefs who have learned all the traditional cooking. They're doing in their restaurants a contemporary version, but there are so many chef-owned restaurants in Mexico now. It is a completely different story.

21:46Still, I think there are those wonderful traditional restaurants that we need to focus on. Creative stuff from the young chefs is wonderful and it will keep the cuisine vital. I still say we have to focus on the traditional stuff. So from that point, right now, I am working on a really big book that really focuses just on Mexican street food. because lots of people love that kind of food, I know. But it also reflects the traditions of many places in Mexico and the different regional tastes. So I'm doing a big book that will catalog that part of the cuisine because as an anthropologist, that is what I'm really interested in.

22:33So you're down in Mexico quite a bit for this project? I go back and forth, but it's super easy from Chicago. I have an apartment in Mexico City because it's so easy to get to. And I can leave my house at seven in the morning and be in my apartment by noon. And so it's a really easy commute in a lot of ways. But Mexico City is sort of my base because there is everything there. If I want to do a street food from a small town in Mexico, I can probably find somebody in Mexico City doing it. Yeah. I think something I think about with you and I observed this first time to tell a story, you know, when you do U.S.

23:12media, you rarely speak Spanish. I mean, people don't understand your deep connection and your fluency in the culture of Mexico. But I was down in Nairi or part of Vallarta. I can't remember years ago. And it was like a food event. It was at a resort or something. And there was a big ballroom of a lot of wealthy Mexicans, some journalists. and you stepped up and I watched you deliver 20 minutes of remarks in Spanish and captivated. I don't speak Spanish, so I did not really know what you were saying. I hope half of it was good. But my point is that I didn't need to know that this audience was captivated.

23:54People were hanging on your words. And I love that. And I tell this story to folks who maybe don't know you, who maybe have judgments about you. I'm like, guys, like, fuck off. Like, Rick Bayless knows what he's doing. I saw him do this here, and he has been traveling this since 1981. So I wanted to share that. Well, thank you. Yeah, I feel comfortable in Spanish. I say to my staff, because oftentimes I do training sessions in Spanish at our restaurant, and I always say I talk like a sixth grader because it's not perfect Spanish by any means, but I feel comfortable in it. Like I said, I've lived in that world for so long now that I feel just comfortable carrying on conversations or delivering training sessions or speeches or whatever.

24:41Yeah, I just loved that element of the way you really command the microphone in both America and in Mexico. I'd love to get a sense about this career in the theater. I didn't get a chance to attend, but A Recipe for Disaster was an immersive play you put on in Chicago. It seems extremely fun. It was. And the concept of influencers being at a dinner and then shit going crazy or wild. Tell us a little bit about this play and other productions that you've done. So I work with this group called Windy City Playhouse that only does immersive theater. and we've written two pieces together and now we're on our third one that we're writing.

25:32The only one we've produced so far is the first one, Recipe for Disaster. But I love immersive theater because it's sort of like the audience is part of it and you're not like sitting away from a stage and looking on. You're actually in the middle of all of the action and that is really fun. And so what we did was basically take every crazy, awful thing that had happened in our restaurant over 30-some years, and we packed it into happening on one night. And it's the story of doing a dinner for influencers to preview a new menu, but the chef doesn't show up. The sous chef has to take over. The sous chef wasn't even there for some of the testing, so he doesn't know what he's doing.

26:25And he gets super nervous, and somebody on the staff says, here, take this vitamin B12 or whatever it is. And it's not. It's Xanax. So he gets loopy. Oh, he gets drugged. And then the health department inspector walks through the door at the same time. And then these crazy influencers are trying to figure out what the food is. And they come across a guy that had dated one of them. And they think he's an important owner of a restaurant, but he's not. So it's just crazy things that just keep unfolding the whole night. But they have, this actually happened in our restaurant. that the main course is supposed to be suckling pig.

27:12So they have a suckling pig arrive, but it doesn't have a USDA stamp on it. And so the health inspector, they know that he's going to flag that thing, but they need it for the service that night. And so they keep hiding the pig all over the place. And that actually happened in our restaurant one time. In the show, we hide the pig all over the restaurant. In real life, what we did was put the pig in somebody's car and drive it around the block until the health inspector left. Because we realized that we had received this pig and it didn't have a USDA stamp on it. So a lot of crazy things happen in restaurants, but we get through them.

28:00But it was a romp. It was really fun to do. and it was super physical. And I got to, it ran for six months, but, and we served food. We served the food. So that's the thing, you served food during it. And also this is like a little docudrama and it seems like a little bit of the menu, a little bit of the bear kind of thrown in. Oh yeah, it was a little bit of all of those things, but told as a classic farce. So there was a lot of slamming doors and mistaken identities and stuff like that. It was super fun. I got to be in it for six weeks. That was all I could commit to. And then I was replaced by somebody else.