I was a full grown-ass man when I learned how to cook, I’m sad to say. When I struck out on my own, I was confined to meals that came in boxes that had instructions, and meatloaf as a means to dispose of bad vegetables. It didn’t help that my store of choice was the 99 Cent Store, and my first oven didn’t come with numbers on the dials. The first time I remember being interested in the culinary arts was as a fan of the show Chopped on the Food Network.
There was something about watching a chef attempt to make a hot dog dessert which captivated me. I felt something along the lines or there truly are no rules and everything is permissible. As long as I was willing to eat the finished product, I could try whatever ridiculous experiments my heart desired. I mixed Chicken McNuggets into an Asian salad. I used pretzels and Honey Nut Cheerios as breading. I turned split pea soup from green to orange with chorizo. I made sriracha at home, spicier but without vinegar. I ate many disgusting things because I was the one who made them disgusting. I foisted many disgusting things (but fewer of them…) upon my girlfriend because she trusted me.
When I read cookbooks, I don’t read them for outright recipes. I’m much more interested in techniques and flavor combinations. How can I take this lamb shawarma recipe and modify it for the next time I make chicken enchiladas? What gourds pair well with shrimp? What is the cheapest alternative to whole stemmed saffron flowers, or beluga caviar? These are the real questions that weigh heavily on my mind when I’m in the kitchen.
Needless to say, I am not a baker.
I think about having the ability to fail big. Big risks, big rewards. Something that is not afforded to a lot of improvisers these days as theaters scrape by. This is part of the importance of having regular, coached practice: the ability to fail big without jeopardizing your goodwill at any particular theater. Someone who has done more failure can tell you in an abstract way whether your scenework will play in front of an audience.
I think about the A to C of cooking, putting disparate elements together to create something familiar yet new. I’m a big proponent of fusion cuisine. Give me some Sicilian-Filipino-American food. You are what you eat, right? And much like you can draw surprising new connections between various ingredients and cuisines, so too can you make surprising connections between various ideas and forms. If you’re anything like me, the majority of your improvisational repertoire is based on a move you saw ten years ago that you thought was really cool.
And much like chefs bouncing between different restaurants throughout their career to glean wisdom from various sources, we also bounce between theaters and workshops and festivals, trying to aggregate all of the accumulated wisdom and disperse cohesively through our own performance and teaching. Stewardship, you might say.
In the latest season of the Bear (the tv show), Carmy and the crew have this discussion about what he wants The Bear (the restaurant) to be. I don’t run a theater or a festival, I don’t know if I will ever have the money to, but if I did, it would sound exactly like Carmy’s dream vision restaurant: he wants to excise all the bullshit and have a panic-less, anxiety-free establishment. He wants to keep alive the interchange of ideas in his kitchen, and he wants every chef that passes through to bring something new and to take away something new. Sort of like the fabled Ship of Theseus, constantly evolving on the inside, changing its constituent parts irreversibly. And it may seem like a pipe dream but that’s the kind of kitchen I’d like to run.