I recycle an old email
I happened across this quotation that I had copied out of an article in some German newsmagazine while eating some mediterranean foodstuff at Knofie on Bergmannstr. towards the end of the time I was in Berlin:
Immer weiter müsse das Experimentieren gehen, sagte er, nur so sei die Tradition zu retten.
Stillstand ist der Tod.
The he who said that is some hotshot molecular gastronomy chef dude with six Michelin stars (twice three, I think, not thrice two or some other combination); most of the article was about his suppliers who go about everything the real way, which is to say, the old-fashioned, expensive, labor-intensive leidenschaftlich way. I thought at the time, and now, seeing it again, think again, that the sort of attitude that sees experimentation as a means of saving traditional values (as opposed to either seeing experimentation as a means of discarding them, or as thinking that experimentation must be opposed for their sake, which is I suppose really the same view twice over with the valences changed) might be easier to pull off in a culinary realm, since there (probably) isn't as much of a teleological view—probably not so many people think that developments in cooking show that we're on the path to something not just newer but superior and that therefore the old can be discarded (or must therefore be exploded because the tradition's out of gas or whatever). Whereas that attitude is not unknown elsewhere (NB I have actually only read a part of that essay, a few paragraphs, really, and they made a different point from that for whose sake I am presently adducing it, and this despite at least two intelligent people having assured me that it's not all bad; though, really, it's probably true that even culinary modernists want their food et). (Though cf. the comment quoting Steve Reich here, and the post to which that comment is pendant is interesting, too.) It could also be that chefs are generally trained in a more hands-on way than, I gather, composers (at least) are these days, though that is presumably not unconnected with the view above.
The article also contained this, which was also interesting, albeit for different reasons:
[so und so] ..., ehemaliger Bauunternehmer, der alles hingeschmissen hat und jetzt das einfache Leben geniesst. Wenn er nicht gerade durch Bali fährt, sammelt er für Veyrat Pilze.
(Veyrat being, I guess, the chef.) I wouldn't mind enjoying that kind of simple life.
Comments
on 2007-01-16 23:43:00.0, bitchphd commented:
My observations of the chef's life are that it involves a lot of knowing about money, a good deal of boom and bust, and ridiculous work hours. Simple, maybe, but not easy.