Norman Van Aken on cookbooks, mental health, and his education in Latin food
This is part 2 of Mike Beltran's sit-down with renowned chef Norman Van Aken. In this portion of the chat, the two talk about Norman's experience publishing books, mental health issues chefs deal with, and the time Norman passed on participating in Top Chef Masters.
Norman Van Aken is one of the most celebrated and consequential chefs in the country. Widely regarded as the founder of new American cuisine and a pioneer of "fusion," Norman has led renowned restaurants, published numerous books, and a nominee for and winner of countless awards, including an induction into James Beard Foundation’s list of “Who’s Who in American Food and Beverage" (where he's the only Floridian chef on the list).
Norman also happens to be among Michael Beltran's mentors. Mike refers to Norman as his "culinary godfather."
Follow Norman Van Aken on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Listen to Norman's radio series, "A Word on Food."
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Transcript
Michael Beltrán: Isn't the first iteration of the foie gras dish in there with parsnip pancakes.
Norman Van Aken: Exactly.
Michael Beltrán: Yeah. I spent a lot of time...
Norman Van Aken: Yeah.That's recipe has gone ... It's like Mickey Mouse, you know, it started off with Steamboat Willie, right? But it's still the mouse at the end. You know what I mean? It's a little fatter mouse. A little fatter, a little happier mouse, a little more corporate mouse in his respect.
Michael Beltrán: It's a much more corporate mouse now!
Nicolás Jiménez: He ate the pancakes.
Michael Beltrán: He ate, the pancakes, yeah.
[THEME SONG]
Nicolás Jiménez: Let's run through the intro that I know we're big fans of ...
Michael Beltrán: Oh, back to the intro! Anyways...
Nicolás Jiménez: You're listening to Pan Con Podcast. I'm Nick Jiménez manners with Mike Beltran. This is part two — so if you haven't heard part one, go back and listen to part one. Not that you'll be lost, but it's a nice foundation.
Michael Beltrán: Right. Yeah, it's a good, it lets you know where we're at and what we're doing.
Nicolás Jiménez: Exactly.
Michael Beltrán: I'm Mike Beltran. The one that's very bad at intros.
Nicolás Jiménez: It's not that you're bad, it's that you just don't like them.
Michael Beltrán: That's true.
Nicolás Jiménez: You know? But that's fine. That's okay. We're here with Carlos "Carluba" Rodriguez.
Carlos Rodríguez: Hello to the people.
Nicolás Jiménez: And special guest Norman Van ... Sorry, Chef Norman Van Aken. I'm in a place where people have to be Chef.
Norman Van Aken: I'm both.
Nicolás Jiménez: You're both. We're with Chef and just Norman.
Michael Beltrán: Chef, author...
Nicolás Jiménez: Chef, author, ... If Mike Ortiz were here, he'd be a magician.
Michael Beltrán: Mike!
Nicolás Jiménez: Uh, yeah, this is part two and we are going to be talking, we were just kind of in the middle of a conversation and I'll leave it in there as a little bit of an intro thing. Uh, but we were talking about books. Yeah.
Michael Beltrán: So the first time I was introduced to you was through, uh, a book that wasn't even yours. Uh, the Charlie Trotter book and you're holding up the big tuna I think it was, and then I bought New World Kitchen and I had set it in part one [of this interview], how much that influenced me. And it's still like, I mean, I use that book all the time and there's very few books I use as often. But how has that felt and been being... authoring so many books and knowing that — and I'm sure people have reached out — that your work has in essence, um, really inspired so many, um, you know, just it's moved people to want to do what we do for a living. And you could have never have met them. You know, like, I say it all the time. I was fortunate enough to work for the book. I worked for the book. And that was an experience that was priceless for me. But there's gotta be so many people that have reached out to you over the years. It's been like, "Thank you. Or...
Michael Beltrán: Yesterday, a woman I don't know, a chef from somewhere else in the United States, I think she's from Pennsylvania. She wrote, I put, you know, I put a picture of Charlie and I up cause it was Charlie Trotter's birthday. And many people that love cuisine are, should know if they don't know, but many do, you know, the, um, the gifts that Charlie shared with the world. And it was my great fortune to become chosen brothers with Charlie. We both loved books. We, we bonded over books and not only cookbooks, certainly cookbooks, but not only cookbook was all forms of literature. Um, I had no, no idea about being a chef when I was growing up. Nobody spoke about being a chef. I didn't watch Julia Child on television. I didn't watch The Galloping Gourmet, no one in their right mind where I was from, talked about being a chef. Um, if you were to look in the want ads for a job as being a cook in my early days, it would have been right there with, you know, if you want it to be an exotic dancer, that's the same place in the newspaper ads that we were.
Nicolás Jiménez: You were never in between those two options.
Norman Van Aken: Those two are only in my dreams.
Michael Beltrán: Ah, Nick! There he is everyone.
Norman Van Aken: Oh my God, it's perfect.
Nicolás Jiménez: If I can only chime in once...
Michael Beltrán: You just did it. Take the mic away from him.
Norman Van Aken: I was working in Key West and I was really in a great spot at Louie's Backyard cause we looked out over the ocean. I was in Key West. And so the little restaurants around town were making straight it had either Cuban food, Bahamian food, Haitian food, southern food. Um, all of those things were happening. There were some that were doing French cuisine and there were some that were sort of doing an amalgam of them both. I was at a place called The Pier House and the owner, God bless them, had the sense to realize that he had something special going on and he, he would go to New York and get a chef to come down to Key West, but he would say, "No, no, I want Bahamian conch chowder. I want key lime pie. I want black bean soup on the menu," And so he made me realize it was okay to have these things as part of a fancy restaurant because it was a hotel that charges a fair amount of money for that time. And I was working with chefs who were the first graduates, pretty much the first graduates out of the Culinary Institute of America. There was some chefs that were also old school, European chefs that worked cruise lines came up through the brigade system in Italy or in France. And so I had these various streams of influence that were going on around me. And uh, and I, and I just loved it. I just was like, I finally realized there was some place that I could go in my life to find what I thought I could only find by either being a songwriter or a playwright or something to do with writing. I was a little too nervous to send in a manuscript and have it be rejected. And so I said, “You know, maybe I can do this thing with cooking.” And I found that I could express myself in a way with food that I had really thought only could happen through writing. And so the energy and the thought process process that, that I saw in cooking kind of miraculously came about in the form of a letter of invitation one day that came to me from a division of Random House to the offices at Louie's Backyard. I can remember Michael to this moment of opening the letter reading this invitation. "Dear chef Van Aken. We recently at your restaurant, Louie's Backyard and Key West. We had dinner on a Friday. We were down there for vacation. No, no intention of doing any kind of like business whatsoever. We love the food so much. We came back the following night, so I have two questions for you," she wrote. "Have you collected your recipes over the years in which you'd like to write a cookbook?" I wrote back, "Yes," lying that I collected my recipes over the years and "Yes, I'd love to write a cookbook," which wasn't a lie because of course I would. I would. I didn't think I was ever going to be approached by that and it was just not in my head. I remember floating, almost floating up in the air just going, "Shit, my life is changing. This is going to be something we're going to do." And I went home that night. Michael and I had a desk pad at our, our rented house in Key West where Janet and I were living. Justin was a little baby still at the time, a little boy. And on that desk blotter, I wrote the introduction in rough form to the book Feast of Sunlight. And then I wrote all these recipes, all these names of dishes that we had served at Louie's Backyard. I didn't even have a computer at that time. You know, I got a typewriter and I sent it to them and said, "Here's my ideas." And a year later, A Feast of Sunlight came out.
It was one of the very first cookbooks written by an American chef, the first cookbook written by a chef from Florida. And it wasn't long after that we were going on a book tour of America, going to all the cities that I'd been reading about. And now they said, "Well, while you're in that town to do the television shows and radio shows and the interviews at night, you can go to a restaurant that you want to go to." And so we just studied hard about all the different restaurants that could be gotten to in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York. And back then there was a budget for these things that doesn't exist pretty much anymore unless you're a major television star. And So Feast of Sunlight was something that I did in the office after I finished my shift cooking the saute line position at Louie's. And then we tested the dishes and it turned into Feast of Sunlight. And that was at that point in time, I was somewhere between the world of representing Florida, but also still holding onto the training wheels of the French and Italian things that were, you know, my teachers still at that point in time, it was not until a little bit after that that it began to more clearly move away from the safety net of the European design and begin to think much more about Florida. So then when I wrote the subsequent books, increasingly I drilled down on trying to represent where we lived first key West than Miami. And in doing that, I created a template, a paradigm for the recipes that we would teach the cooks in the restaurant and how to make the dishes that we would make. And so I was able to get double duty out of it. I was able to hone my abilities as a writer but also begin to be much more clear as far as what I was about, what I wasn't about. And so then I just kept going. Every book was another place I wanted to learn from. New World Cuisine was really kind of a Charlie-like book. Uh, cause by the time that book came out, Charlie was being published cause Charlie hadn't been published until after I did feast. Um, although we worked together before that. But by the time I did New World Kitchen, what I was doing there was I was seeking to educate myself about all of South America. Cause I'd learned a lot about Caribbean food by that time, by working in Key West and by writing Feast of Sunlight. But when I did New World Kitchen, I threw myself into a huge project that I thought would take maybe a year and a half. And it took four years.
Norman Van Aken: There's 30 odd countries that are represented in that book. And when you write the book, you have to realize you can't do 12 dishes with venison. You've got to mix it up. And so even though you might've found nine good dishes with venison or snapper or whatever, you've got to make sure that at the end of the day you've got a composition that's going to be, you know, it's going to cover the bases. So in the editorial process, if it were an album, I guess I would have had 30 songs that had to hone it down to 10 or 12. And so, I mean, I am, I leaned on everybody that I could learn from. We interviewed everybody that worked at Norman's at the time. Where are you from? Where are your parents from? Where your grandparents from? What do you cook at home? We began to invite especially the mothers and the grandmothers into our test kitchen, which was where we did our corporate events at night to make dishes from their countries. And then we would, you know, we would tape and we would write down and we would cook with them. We would study these dishes that I had really no understanding of. I didn't know Brazilian food, Argentinian food, food from Uruguay. I had no idea how incredibly diverse and powerful the food of Peru was at that time because I had never lived in any of these places. Of course I didn't. But by kind of restricting myself from falling on the things I had known already, we, we learned so much. And that's why one of the reasons you write a book, you don't write books often to make money because they barely ever realize the advance. They don't, you do it out of that desire for your own self education.
Michael Beltrán: I'm guessing, but the opportunity to really influence a future generation has got to feel huge. You know, it's gotta be like, I mean, the fact that you could essentially influence a whole other generation of young chefs has gotta be very gratifying and empowering. You know, like even, I mean, on the smallest scale that we are in our little slice of Coconut Grove here in the corner, the fact that some of these people have grown so much just in the two years that they've been here, for me, feels incredible. So the fact that there's six opportunities for people to read about food, whether it be your own or almost like an alliance of food, of learning all encompassing, it's gotta be amazing. You know?
Norman Van Aken: It's humbling too because I don't even speak Spanish very well. I could speak a little kitchen Spanish, and here I am, you know, a guy from this little town, I mean, the town I'm actually from, it's 250 people. The town that I went to grade school in had 17,000 people. That's where I grew up. Fortunately, uh, my mom, again, not with any kind of fore-knowledge of it, she was very influential in the sense that she had an incredible curiosity about other people where they came from, what their culture was. She was born in New York City and when I was just about 10, my maternal grandfather died. So our maternal grandmother, Nana, came to live with us from New York City. She never had driven a car, but she grew up in New York and through the, through the time period before motorized cars through the burlesque era, her father was a show business agent, represented people like Al Jolson. Buster Keaton played in the house with my grandmother. So she brought in this worldly sort of influence that I would have missed out on had she had not come to live with us. Correspondent to that. My mother would bring friends home from the restaurant that she worked in and they could be from Mexico, they could be from Japan, and they'd make food from their respective countries. And so, well before I became involved in kitchens, I could see through my mom that she was open to anybody else, whatever else they were into, whatever else they were about. And so I was a sponge for learning from other people. It gives me an amazing amount of joy that I have been welcomed into the community in the ways that I've had as a person also able to instruct about Latin Caribbean food. I did a dinner in Los Angeles three years ago with José Andrés, Aarón Sánchez, Gastón Acurio. And I'm like...
Michael Beltrán: What a line up, jeez.
Norman Van Aken: "What am I doing here?" And they're like, "You're the honorary gringo, man. You're going to be speaking Spanish by the time this night is over." And we drank enough Mezcal to where I think I was, but to be you know ... It was the night of Latin stars actually. that's how it was billed it. They did four nights in a row in this incredible thing that was put on by ... it was headed up by the the wife of the Los Angeles chef, Ludo. Chef Ludo.
Michael Beltrán: Ludo Lefebvre.
Norman Van Aken: From Trois Mec, yeah, among other places. Yes. His wife did this thing and one night it was the French chefs and one night it was the American chefs. One night it was the Latin chefs. And here's Norman van Aken was as one of the Latin Chefs. That was a, that was a cool night.
Michael Beltrán: When I think about kind of being a younger cook, I often tell my guys like, one of the biggest parts of your development is not just cooking, it is learning and it's applying yourself outside of actually just working, you know, like, just cause you clock out and you go home doesn't mean that your job is done. Sometimes they don't get it and sometimes they do. And the really good ones will go and, they'll buy books and they'll learn and you know, there'll be like, "Chef, do you know, you know who Sean Brock is?" Yeah, no, I know who Sean Brock is. You know, and it's, ... I remember one of my cooks, "I got this Sean Brick book," and I'm like, "Oh gosh, come on." I don't know. Now more than ever like my outside-of-work learning has increased so much because it's like I'm learning how to build menus and how to plan for future menus. How does a menu flow? And it's like ... We talk about music all the time and it's like an album, you know? How does ... how do the songs all go together? Like when you listen originally the way the music was intended to be listened to was that you listened to the entire album, right? Side A and then the B side. And you know, we get away from that. But in reality a menu is supposed to speak to you the same way. And I think when you read a book and the books that kind of like put it down for you, that way you can kind of see your chef's purpose through writing a menu so well. And you know, New World Cuisine was a lot of that. I felt a lot of that in that book. It's just so important to the development of like where you want to go to, you know, and how you decide to challenge yourself. And so we've talked a lot about Charlie Trotter, but I did a dinner, it's gotta be, no, it's not a year, maybe eight months ago. And I really wanted to challenge myself to cooking only vegetables the entire dinner. And that's been a big thing for Ariete as a whole, like making our food more vegetable-forward and using Miami as a landscape for that. So in one of his books, he has this absolutely incredible carrot terrine. I don't know if you remember that.
Norman Van Aken: Of course. Yeah.
Michael Beltrán: So I was like, you know, "I'm going to make this dish but my way and hopefully it honors the chef who created it." So it was like, and I think I shared this with you, but it was a set in a star fruit gelée. We had taken star fruits and preserve them and we made a gelée and baby carrots from Bee Heaven. And we made a kale aguachile. It was a very interesting dish, but it shows that when you study enough ... and that terrine had always intimidated me forever, my entire career. Cause you know, charcuterie has always been a big thing for me. Like, I love-
Norman Van Aken: And you do it well.
Michael Beltrán: Thank you. Um, pâtés, terrines, uh, mousses all that stuff I feel like is a forgotten part of the kitchen that people need to really like get into.
Norman Van Aken: Anybody can turn over a steak on the grill. I mean, that's not to say I'm undermining anybody's contributions, but you're showing true craft when you can do things like that. If in pastry or making a proper souffle, I mean, you know, Jacques Pépin's omlette will live forever. It's the craft of it. And the learning of it, this is exactly why it will never, sometimes we'll say, "Hey, why don't you retire? Shouldn't you retired by now." And I'm like, "What? And quit the whole opportunity it is for me to continue to learn?" I would never quit. I mean, it's not because of money, although, you know, we all have money to deal with in our lives, but it's the on going joy of learning that that is there. And you can learn from anyone too. That's what's great about cuisine is that somebody has a skill. I was cooking in Key West and we had a, we had a fairly surprisingly large group of people in our restaurant at that point that had come from Eastern Europe, from Belarus and places like this. There was a whole nother thing. People had never lived in Key West before, but for economic reasons, they settled in Key West. This one man who was like built like a brick shit house, but he was seventy years old, made these most delicately, incredibly impossible, subtle, uh, noodles that he served to for family meal to the people in the kitchen one day. And I'm like, you know, "Boris, that was incredible. Can I make the filling? And you make the noodles?" "Of course, chef, of course." And he was like rocked that I was asking him to participate in a dish that was gonna end up on the menu, on the tasting menu. And because he had this skill with this particular noodle dough' and the way that he filled his things, I'm like, "Huh, I am so putting that in."
Michael Beltrán: Rewind to a long time ago, when I was at Tuyo and I remember you had just hired me, um, subsequently the guy who worked grill quit, uh, like two weeks after that. So I...
Norman Van Aken: You're a hard act to follow.
Michael Beltrán: No, no. I, I took his job. Remember? He just stopped... Whatever. So I remember part of our daily things was we had to make family meal every day. And I made my grandmother's tamal en cazuela recipe and it was the first time I've ever done it and I was super stressed out because my grandmother's recipe. I was like, "I don't want to fuck the shit up." So I made it. And you tried it and you were like, "Man, this is really good," I was like, "Thanks." And then the next week you were like, "What if we put that tamal en cazuela on the menu?" I don't know if you remember, we put it on the tasting menu.
Norman Van Aken: I do. Yeah.
Michael Beltrán: We served it with shaved truffles. In the little Le Creuset molds. And that was the first time I ever had the honor of putting anything on one of your menus. And it was ... I remember as a younger person I was like, "Wow, like fuck me, I just put a dish on Norman Van Aken's menu ... Like this is incredible." You know, I always remember that experience because it showed me the value of ... That was the first time I learned the value of that soulful meaningful cooking and how that is the first thing. And I had done a fuck ton of weird things that I had presented to you at that time already. But that was the first thing that you were like, "This is delicious." And it was one of the more simple things I had ever done. And that was the first time that ... And it took me years after that for me to realize like, "You know, the answer was in front of me the whole time." You know, we're not reinventing the wheel. We want to find those wheels that make you feel, that make you feel, you know? Something that gives you like ... it tugs at your heartstrings. That dish will forever mean the world to me. And it lived on the Ariete menu for a long time. It's not on there now, but it's making a comeback on our winter menu. Come see us in October. But yeah, like that was, it's interesting that you brought up that -
Norman Van Aken: I love the collaboration. I mean I'm at, you know, I'm at this age I'm at now to one of the greatest joys I have is seeing you and your generation and the ones that are 10 years older than you and so on, how you spin, how you develop, how you have found your, your voice better through having worked in the kitchens that we tried to foster, which is a very collaborative spirit that we try to have. I mean front of the house too. But I love that. I love to see how you and Matt and Gio here, and now Devin, how you folks are going to now you know ... Your story is going to come forward in your own way. That to me as the, you know, the old director that I've been, this is one of the reasons why it doesn't get dull. I am never going to be satisfied just making my tried and true, my signature dishes, the dishes that have paid a lot of bills. More important to me is to see the spirit of learning, collaboration, growth, investigating, travel, what that does for you and how you then make your story evolve without being... without copying the dishes that you maybe saw somewhere else. But at least, you know, grasping the spirit of these things and go, "I am going to do that, but I'm going to do this in the way that is also part of my lineage." That's fantastic. I love it.
Michael Beltrán: Yeah. I mean, the conversation of being a chef I think in today's world has changed. And I think that there was a time period that it was always like, what's cool and what's new? The chefs that really excite me are the ones that are like telling a story, you know, and when you eat their food, you can feel that. You can like really sense it. It's not just robotic approach, you know? And I always, I go back a lot to when I was younger... I've had the opportunity to work for some really amazing people and they asked me, you know, how was it working for Norman? And I was like, I learned when I worked for you, how to challenge myself to think outside of the box but still respect the box. It's so lost on people, that idea, you know, like thinking outside the box, put respecting box. It's always like, we just want to burn this fucking box with no foundation. And I mean we, we cooked proper, you know, sherry strat. Holy shit, fuck if that, if people could get a window into the life of Gio Fesser for those two years, making sherry strat, man or a 20th century mole, or like just so many ... the plantain crema, oof. If people could understand those dishes have your imprint. But the foundationary technique is technique in its essence. It is what teaches you how to cook. And that's why books are so important. And not just coming out of culinary school and saying, "I'm going to be a chef." It's not going to work that way. It's just not going to happen. You're going to have to learn how to be one.
Norman Van Aken: That's a big problem. And the kids come out of the school and they think they're ready to rumble, they're ready to like become the person who articulates a menu and the schools are not capable of causing that development within the two or three years that you're going to go to a school like that. You need 10 years of being in the woodshed before you're going to get to that place. And I think there's false expectations -
Michael Beltrán: For sure.
Norman Van Aken: And also there's a hardcore process of paying the bills back and you know, somebody is gonna say, okay, you know, "We're going to make you the executive vice president, sous chef of the, you know, the third brigade" or some dreamed up title for what they're going to be. And essentially. They're just going to be, you know, doing all the hard labor that needs to happen. I mean, there was a point in time like where I was, you know, overseeing a fairly large crew at the original Norman's. I must have had 15 cooks in that restaurant at that time. We were doing 300 covers a night, tasting menu, a la carte menu. We had 21 cheeses on the cheese trolley. I mean we were at that place and I was realizing that they were being really hard on themselves for what they had not accomplished yet, where they hadn't gotten to, how they hadn't been on television, how they hadn't been in a magazine, how they didn't have their own show on the television Food Network. So I went to the office and I built a spreadsheet essentially saying where I was at 25, 26, 35, 40. And what I'd accomplished by that time. Okay, here I am, I'm 33. I've never made a beurre blanc. Here I am at 37. I've never written a cookbook. Here I am at 41. I've never owned a restaurant. Okay, so you guys who are twenty four years old are stepping on yourselves because you haven't done this, that and the other thing, but you haven't given yourself time to get to that place to where it's going to come. You have to do the foundational work for it to come. It's not like, you know, I'm saying, hey, we walked through, you know, school through the snow. You know, and all that stuff. It's just the way it works. Whether you're a sculptor or whether you're a musician or whether you're a cook who wishes to be the chef of their own restaurant. There's time that you got to put in. Nothing ever happens just like on TV. It's got to happen.
Michael Beltrán: Well, I tell young cooks all the time by going to culinary school is like a movie preview. You've got to go watch the movie. You know, this is, it's nice. It's a good time. I'm sure you had a great time because you probably didn't work while you were in school, but this is real life and it's a hectic environment.
Norman Van Aken: I wish they would take a little piece of advice. Before you go and plunk down the tuition, at least go to some restaurant in your neighborhood, your town, whatever, and do a stage. At least spend a week in a real restaurant and find out whether or not that really pertains to what you think your life is going to be. I remember a really nice husband and wife came to one of the cooking classes I was doing in South Miami number of years ago, many years ago. Ariana's Cooking School — it was a great place and they were well off and they said, you know, at the end of the class they're very excited. And they said, "You know, our daughter Matilda, she wants to go to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. And she's really excited about becoming a chef." And I'm like, "Wow, really? That's amazing." I knew they could swing it. And I said, "All right, um, let's do this though. When you get home at night one of these nights and she's there and you're there, I want you to go into the refrigerator and want you to accidentally on purpose drop a bottle of blue cheese dressing from some height onto the kitchen floor and ask her to clean it up. And if she's afraid to clean that up or too high and mighty to clean that up, I don't think she's going to be able to handle the kitchen because that's every day. That's the stuff you gotta be willing to get in there and deal with that.
Michael Beltrán: Well, you know what I think is a really interesting topic. Talking about like the kitchen life. I think I came up in a very interesting time that the dynamic in kitchens were changing, but they were still changing. They weren't, they're not changed. And I think they're still changing today. Like, you know, the way that we treat each other and the way we talk to each other, the way that we ... Kind of like the rough and ready aspect of like being in a kitchen has changed. I feel like I got kinda both sides of that. Cause you know, I worked for some really incredible older guys like Spaniard guys that would throw paella pans at me, but then after they would pop a beer open and have a beer with me and it'd be like, "Everything's fine." And you know, I had the opportunity to work for guys like Phil Bryant — that was my chef when I worked for you — that were just ... I think the best way to explain Phil is like, he is incredibly connected to the kitchen and he knows what it needs on a daily basis. Does that make sense?
Norman Van Aken: Phil is, Phil is a precious person. He's like an old cook in his soul.
Michael Beltrán: Oh yeah.
Norman Van Aken: A modern cooking, his ability, you know. He would rather cook than he'd rather sleep for sure. He is that guy and I love that about him.
Norman Van Aken: A modern cooking, his ability, you know. He would rather cook than he'd rather sleep for sure. He is that guy and I love that about him.
Michael Beltrán: It takes me back to that first service at 180 and it was hectic and it was a big restaurant and we were like, "we don't know what the fuck's about to happen here." And then Phil looked at the sauté guys station, 10 minutes, before we opened, he was like, "get the fuck outta here." And then he works sauté and he fucking crushed, you know, like, and then I worked for guys like Roel and Michael, I've been lucky enough to see like so many different dynamics. I worked with Hedy, but the times that you came up in the kitchen, where do you see like the biggest changes from today's world to then? Like, and I don't mean in ... cause I think we see a different, I think, um, kind of like a personality in people. I think how much people want to work in the kitchen has changed because they want to be on covers of magazines but they don't want to make buerre blanc, you know what I mean? What has really changed the most do you think?
Norman Van Aken: You know, Mike, in my own experience I was a happy warrior. I loved to be in the kitchen. I look at that clock and the clock was moving in the wrong direction for me. I didn't want it to be three o'clock. I wanted it to be two o'clock because I needed more time to make the food. When I was young and I was working in factories and places like that, I hated the clock. It was 10 o'clock in the morning and I wanted it to be five o'clock at night. I have come to understand that for many people the pressure and the self-worth situations are totally upside down for them and they took and remain taking a beating. And so I appreciate and applaud the new awareness towards a self care. I mean when you see the tragic death of Tony Bourdain who was a close friend, he wrote the beginning of New World Kitchen — the foreword — for me. I was on his show couple of times. When you see the self care discussion that Sean Brock is bringing to the dialogue in our world among others out there. I mean, in many ways it was stupid and tragic and harsh the world that we allowed to exist in the '70s and the '80s. I remember being in one place where a woman who was working with me, suddenly there was a puddle underneath her station 'cause she refused to leave the line.
Michael Beltrán: I remember you telling me that story.
Norman Van Aken: So instructive to me that "wait a minute" ... and in some ways I'm responsible for, you know, kind of this mania attitude that I was willing. I mean, at that point in time, I was living away from my family six days and six nights a week living in the hotel so I could make these restaurants work. My son was 9 years old. Janet was having to take care of the home, the family, while I was following my passion as a chef. And I was kind of like just completely gonezo about it all at that point in time. Later, by the time Norman's came along, I had become more of a shepherd and understanding how I needed them to be okay with themselves, to just take care of themselves. And so, you know, I'm glad that we're seeing a shift in this because, you know, we need to have a life to now, on the other hand, I'm concerned that our business, you know, the restaurant business is how it's going to survive because increasingly it seems to me that very few young people are willing to work 40 hours a week anymore. And so, you know, somewhere between those two craziness is, you know, the, I don't really want to work four days a week, three days a week, five days. I don't want to work 90 hours a week. Okay. But somehow for us to be able to attain the kind of proficiency that we want to have, there does have to be this commitment. It doesn't have to be give up your life to be a chef, but it still means if you're really going to be good in this business, damn.
Michael Beltrán: You gotta apply yourself.
Norman Van Aken: You gotta apply yourself. You've gotta have your notebooks. I call them dream sheets. You've got to have your notebooks, your logs, you gotta have the process. And the procedure. And yet you've got to take also enough time to make sure to check in with them and make sure they're not going out and destroying themselves and giving up a portion of their ultimate happiness.
Michael Beltrán: It's a very tough balance. You know, like me personally, I feel very fortunate that I have amazing mentors around me that have ... You know, when I have a question about stuff, life, food, you know, I will text you.
Norman Van Aken: I love getting, "Chef, can we have coffee." I'm like, yeah, we can have coffee.
Michael Beltrán: You know, And, um, and you know, I have that relationship with several people, so I find myself very fortunate. Even then I'm like in this place, because I do love what I do so much and it will drive you fucking mad. And you know it does. I mean, because we want it to be so great, you know? And I think that's what really separates the good ones from the great ones. And there's so many great ones that don't get any notice at all. There's so many of those.
Norman Van Aken: But the mythology that exists is sometimes that you have to kill yourself to attain greatness. You know, and we lost Charlie and we too young. I mean, Charlie would've been 60 yesterday and I'm thinking, Jesus Christ, he's been gone how many years now? And he would have just been 60. I mean, it wasn't only cooking that did it, the culinary life. I mean it was, there was some preexisting conditions with his, you know, with his body that ended it. But there are so many that have crashed and burned and, so this is a good thing. This part of the conversation is part of the educational part of the conversation. Somewhere we find the balance.
Michael Beltrán: Well it's having the conversation that's very important. You know, I several times need to tell myself like, you need to fucking relax. I just take it fucking easy. Go home, smoke a cigar, take it easy, put your books away, put your notebook away. Just like, do nothing for once. You know, it's tough because, when you say that thing that drives you to greatness, what is greatness in our industry? We don't fucking know. There's no like ... All the things ... What are all the things? It's more like an internal thing that, what is the question you're trying to answer for yourself? And you know, I just turned 34 and I still ask myself that. Like, "What am I doing? What are you trying to do? Who are you talking to? What is the conversation you're trying to have?" And for so many chefs that want to make a difference, that is the struggle that they live with on a daily basis. So to take that and then add on top of that, "Now you're responsible for 25 young people and their development and their mental health," you know, that in and of itself has a lot of responsibility too. This weekend I've worked both brunch shifts and you know, like I'm the two types of brunch guys. I'm like a really pleasant one or I'm a fucking animal. It's like one of the two. Cause you know, I mean we all know how brunch works. So midway through brunch I was have to ask myself, "you need to take a deep breath and you just need to relax, take it easy." But I would say that eight years ago I wouldn't give a fuck and I would just go, let me just go, just beat yourself up against the wall and just figure it out. But now that we are all very aware and willing to have this conversation is the only reason that I stopped myself and I asked myself, "What are you doing? Take it easy, go outside, walk in a circle, come back." You know, it's like it's those things. And obviously losing someone as important to all of us as Anthony Bordain was, you know, I think that struck a nerve and there was several people before that, you know, that we lost that weren't that - I mean losing Anthony Bordain to this mental struggle was apocalyptic.
Norman Van Aken: Absolutely.
Michael Beltrán: I mean it was ...
Norman Van Aken: His greatest legacy is not going to be No Reservations or Kitchen Confidential. His great as legacy will be the self care movement.
Michael Beltrán: Right. And that was like such a big slap in the face of so many people.
Norman Van Aken: Absolutely.
Michael Beltrán: It was like, what are we doing now? What are we doing this for? You know, and sometimes it takes longer to figure out that the answer to that question.
Norman Van Aken: That does were, you know, human beings, we're very, we're, we learn only through tragedy it seems at the time. I mean we, we learn a lot through joy, but we learn a lot through getting our asses kicked and losing people.
Michael Beltrán: We must say hello. Hello. It's okay. Thank you for coming. It's good seeing you.
Norman Van Aken: That's the upside of being in the business, right there.
Michael Beltrán: It's one of all so many upsides. I mean, you know, but there is so many great things. It's not all bad. By no means.
Norman Van Aken: Oh my gosh, no.
Michael Beltrán: There's so many. Like great. The people, the food. Like when I was a younger and I was making like nothing and I'm like I overcooked a piece of foie gras. Let me try that. That's, that's a perk in life. You know, like not hot. I don't know how many people would say, yeah, I had foie gras on a Tuesday. I drank like amazing bottles of wine and I had great cocktails and... I mean, just the opportunity that we cooked for Charlie Trotter when I was at 180. I mean, it was like, honestly, when Charlie walked into the restaurant, it's like everybody froze. It's like, "Charlie Trotter, whoa". You know what I mean? Cause we had already gotten over the hump, like, we're working for Norman Van Aken, but now it's like Charlie Trotter walked into the building, it's like silence so I could hear a needle drop, you know? So there's, there's so many incredible things.
Norman Van Aken: When you care about care about food and restaurants the way we do, it's being able to have the access to the people that you admire. And one of the greatest things that I had so much fun doing is to do the chef dinners or be a part of other people's, chef's dinners that we've had so we could, you know, we could bring those people in to cook with you folks. Uh, or in my or on the other side, I would go to New Orleans and cook with Emeril and then he would bring in, you know, chefs from around New Orleans or chefs from around the United States, or Charlie who was the all-time greatest at this. Cause Charlie would bring in nine chefs from around the world and it would be the who's who of America. And very time we'd go to the restaurant, 816 west Armitage, and there'd be a team photo taken on the steps of that restaurant. And you could just, you know, see our young faces on those stairs. Oh my God. You know, there's Emeril and there's Charlie and there's Kerry Simon when there's Jonathan Waxman and there's Gunter Seeger.
Michael Beltrán: Jonathan Waxman.
Norman Van Aken: Yeah. And then, you know, we cooked with Frédy Girardet. I mean, creating the access or being around the access of it, that is one of the greatest parts of it. I saw a note that I had written to myself the other day. I Found it the other day, but it was from 2003. I was on the road 75 that year doing events around the country and I wrote down the cities that we were in and it was just like, "Wow, that was amazing that we had that available to us as partt of our job. That we got to do those things and interact with those people and interface and share our cuisine and what we were doing and we would see what they were doing and taste what they were doing. And the of course having the parties afterward and being in these other places and sharing in all that. I hope that in this day and age of the constancy of the Internet that people don't get too burned out and feel that they're always in competition. How come they don't have this much money from having written a cookbook or how come they don't have four restaurants or nine restaurants or why don't they have something in Vegas or Abu Dhabi or some other place. Please, don't let your life become so affected by what you don't have. Think about the things you do and you’ll be better off.
Michael Beltrán: Yeah. I really dislike competition shows, you know, the food ones. And I only say that because for me, food is not competition. It's community. You know, it is the building blocks of community. It is what makes people come to one table and have a conversation, which is what we lack so much of. We're not conversing anymore. We're competing. And I'm all about competition. I played football for a long time. I fucking love it. It's great. But when I'm sitting here talking to you about food, I don't want to compete with you. I want to cook with you. I want to eat together, I want to drink, I want to have a good time. You know, like, it's so "I just want to be better than you." Just be the best you can be.
Norman Van Aken: Just be the best you can be. We brought up Jacques Pépin's name earlier. Jacques -
Michael Beltrán: What a great book by the way, The Apprentice, if you haven't read it as an incredible book.
Norman Van Aken: And he hates the competition shows. You know he's really thinks they're damaging. And I agree. I was offered the opportunity to be on Top Chef Masters and I really kicked it around for a while and it was at a time when I could have used the boost for business' sake. And I thought, you know what? No. I mean I was on Top Chef and you know, was a judge and all that stuff. But then I saw like, you know what it might be like, how they could turn me into any character you want to turn me into. I can be really famous for nine months, but famous as what? A character, a caricature. And I said, I'm stepping back. I'm not doing it.
Michael Beltrán: Yeah. That's fucking great. I fucking love that man. That's amazing. I guess, uh, we'll start to wind down here. We have wind down music.
Nicolás Jiménez: We'll put some in here.
Michael Beltrán: All right, good.
Nicolás Jiménez: Yeah. Um, was that the wind down?
Michael Beltrán: What we're starting to wind down, we're just, we're like hey we're winding down and we're gonna this is the last part of the show, right?
Nicolás Jiménez: So I'll put the wind down music now.
Music: Yeah, it's the final countdown.
Michael Beltrán: So chef, thank you so much for doing this.
Norman Van Aken: Michael, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me on Pan Con Podcast!
Michael Beltrán: Yeah. Um, it was a good time. Uh, we could literally talk for hours, I'm sure as we have in the past.
Norman Van Aken: We're just getting started.
Michael Beltrán: Yeah, I can only say thank you for everything you've done for me and for the entire community. If they haven't, if people haven't thanked you. They should. Um, and that's all I really got here.
Norman Van Aken: You thank me every day. Like continuing to succeed, Mr. 34?
Michael Beltrán: Yeah. 34,
Norman Van Aken: 34 years old? By continuing the success of what you're doing, by building the teams, by having a delicious, hospitable restaurant here that we can come to and enjoy. I walked in here tonight and two of the most loyal customers we ever had at the original Norman's were sitting there enjoying themselves and then within a moment I realized this is their place. This is where they come to.
Michael Beltrán: Yeah. They've been here a lot. Hey, shut out to Pat and Harold.
Norman Van Aken: Unbelievable.
Michael Beltrán: Yeah, they're the best.
Norman Van Aken: Then I'm so looking forward to, you know, to returning to Chug's, and I'm also so looking forward to Nave and the team that you're putting together in there, I can't wait for people to taste what Michael Beltrán's and Justin Flit's vision for this restaurant is going to be. And how they're going to interpret and give more storytelling to South Florida through food.
Michael Beltrán: We're excited. We're, we're definitely excited. It's been a busy year. Uh, so I'm ready to take a nap