Creative Process

[cookperrync]

Chef...

Thank you for taking this time to chat. I am a young chef and have always been intrigued by the creative process that happens in the kitchen. Could you talk a little about how you make time to experiement with foods and combinations, and just how you set out creating dishes for Trio? I am also curious about reluctance from the owners of Trio to try "new" things and how you handled those issues - if they existed. Again...thank you for your time and I hope this continues...

Perry

[chefg]

Perry:

As I left the French Laundry to come to Trio I knew I wanted to commit to a cuisine that was highly creative. I thought it would be very difficult to find a situation where an owner would give me "carte blanche" of a high end restaurant knowing the creative level I wanted to produce. Luckily my first inquiry was with Henry Adinaya, the propreitor of Trio. After 4 months of dialog, each of us expressing our goals and getting to know eachother, I realized I found the perfect platform. Henry was very open to the forward thinking process, and actually used it himself in overseeing the dinning room. We took some baby steps in the begining, but the goal was shared at the inception of the partnership.

Once we commited to this "creative cuisine" it became less of a choice and more of an expectation. Both from the standpoint of the customer, myself and the brigade. We make time to create. Often we saty late into the night talking abou tor experimenting wih tnew ideas. I knew the food I wanted to produce would be different, the cooks that were hired did so with the trust that this experience would be different than any they had experienced before, press releases were cut, dinning room was trained, the PERSONALITY of the restaurant was reshaped to project the cuisine of our vision.

The actual conception of dishes come in many different venues. It starts with a focus of forward thinking. That is the way we process food. We are a very cerbral kitchen, an enormous amount of thought goes into the dishes we create. The deconstruction of food itself is very important. As I mentioned before, the more you know about an ingredient the better you will be able to manipulate it. Connecting it to other ingredients by way of flavor, texture, PH, memory, smell, region, color, temperature, expectation and so on, makes new dishes possible. It is this very basic approach to food that produces dishes that seem so complex. When they were concieved the process wasn't : Gold beetroot will taste good with Mukasi Soy and pumpkin seeds. NO. It was: the sweet earthy flavor of the raw beet will taste good with the saltiness of the soy and the nuttiness of the pumpkin seeds. If we juice the beets it will be very lean and bright, we can balance this with the fattiness from a pumpkin seeds, and contrast the sweetness with the salty soy. We will make the pumpkin seeds into a oil which will float on the juice, giving us a mouth coating effect since it will be the first thing in the mouth, the soy will sink to the bottom, making it a perfect ending to the consumption, a contrast needed after taking in the naturally sweet beet juice. I hope this example illistrates how we anylize food and turn it into a dish.