(continued)

Pinky:
Do you think it's better to be self-taught or to go to the CIA? Do you hire people who have gone to cooking school, or people working their way up, or both? Which do you like better?

Norman Van Aken:
I have nothing against people who have decided to take a formal education. But I generally find that the best employees did not need to go through formal training because their passion and motivation is so strong, that they would have become chefs regardless of any lack of economic or educative process. I welcome those that are trained, those that are not trained: heart is the most important thing, because I can teach them how to know. I cannot teach them how to care, but I can teach them how to know.

Widmerpool:
Where are the frontiers of cuisine now? Do you think Asia will continue to be the principal influence in 'new' cooking?

Norman Van Aken:
I think it'll be pretty exciting generally speaking, but I think Asian and Latin flavors are going to get the greatest amount of attention in terms of middle America finding out about these things over the next 4-5 years.

It's a really great thing, this idea of how the US has changed. I was in the store yesterday. Not a big gourmet store, a casual little grocery store. A wife turned to her husband, and said, "Would you like me to get some of the grilled portobello sandwiches?" And I was like, my gosh. These are people in workout clothes on a casual day, golden retriever probably in the car, and this is the learning curve. So much further along that you might have imagined ten years ago.

And I thank all those people I mentioned earlier, and the publications and institutions, like the IACP, the James Beard foundation, magazines like Gourmet -- it means our children will have more choices in terms of the cultural opportunities. Choice was what really drove our generation. We might have all folded in a little bit, as far as the Woodstock Nation idea, but wouldn't we like our kids to be able to have a spring roll, or an empanada, or a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich?

The idea is that like I don't want my kids, your kids, my grandchildren, whatever, to have the sort of mall-corporate experience of what those things are. I really would like them not to have the cheez whizcategory of those experiences. I want them to have the itinerant, immigrant, honest, familial, world-culture tastes, flavors, and textures of these foods, without the white-bread homogenization.

And I want to fight like crazy and teach and push to make sure that there's no one "right" cuisine -- French is better than Mexican, or Mexican is better than French. It's thinking about that great human dialect, those different patois, that has really, really propelled me forward to be a chef.

susan herskowitz:
Norman, you have such an amazing staff at your restaurant ... the service is always impeccable ... how do you insure that your staff shares your vision of how a guest is to be treated?

Norman Van Aken:
I think you include them in understanding the ideal of being a guest. One of the most important things is they come here and experience the restaurant as a guest -- Obviously they have to work here for a certain number of months beforehand, but then, for one night they come in and we don't talk about work. We give them the experience as if we did not know them, so they can sort of examine the experience in the most intimate and real sense.

Norman Van Aken:
And that's not only waiters. That's chefs, prep cooks, dishwashers, everybody. Because we want everyone to understand why they would work the way they work.

Mister Asher:
Norman, Aside from famous restaurants, where do you dine when you're in New York?

susan herskowitz:
Living in New York... I also want to know where you dine when in New York?

Norman Van Aken:
When I go to New York -- well, before I leave, I check the little folder on my computer. That's where I have, like, all the cities in the world, and I personally enter little notes, suggestions from customers, tips from writers and travelers, that are my little -- I keep my own crib sheet. And that would include restaurants reviewed on a website, or in The New York Times, so it's a collection of the tried and trues -- the Daniels, the Gramercies -- or a piece I haven't been to, like this Peacock Alley I've been hearing about, or a pizza joint on the lower east side. My friend Emeril would say, "You have to go to this place on the upper east side, for great gnocchi." You'd never hear of it otherwise. I love tips like that.

Norman Van Aken:
I love that little feeling of, "Nobody knows about his place yet." The greatest joy is finding the place nobody knows about yet. Like in New Orleans, we go to Uglesich's (that's a family name) at like 1235 Barone Street, only open for lunch, and you eat things like Shrimp Shirley and Trout Anthony and you walk out and your pants are already bursting, and it's so rich and so New Orleans! Or there'll be some funky pizza place in the suburbs of Chicago that you'll go to. Like Bill's. Thin, crispy, pizza that's just like so good. I like those little tips.

And I like the books that have been written by that husband-wife couple Jane and Michael Stern. My dream is to one day take a long vacation (something I've never been able to do), travel the blue highways of America, eat in these Alabama catfish roadhouses and stuff -- that's be great. I'd take those dishes and shamelessly find a way to make those great flavors appear on my menus.

That's fusion cuisine to me. It's not about taking Thai and French food and lashing it together -- but taking great, great French haute cuisine and mixing it with old farmhouse cuisine. A real gutsy, earthy, Norman cuisine, or Burgundian crazy-so-good flavor.

gourmand:
Norman, which Asian cuisine inspires you most in developing fusion dishes -- Cantonese, Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, Philippine, etc.?

Norman Van Aken:
Yes.

Just kidding. I don't mean to simplify those cuisines. How could you not be overwhelmed by any of those countries? With 5000 years of history on any side -- just the flavors -- how could you not be influenced? By all of them? So I am.

Widmerpool:
Is it possible for a cuisine to require 'integrity', possible for one to betray a cuisine by experimenting too far, or going down the wrong path? It's a question one has to ask about globalization in all sorts of spheres, even cooking, it seems.

Norman Van Aken:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you can make a really bad, bad amalgam of flavors and cuisines. When I talk to young chefs, and they're trying to figure out if a particular mixture of cultures will work, I have this imaginary tourist walk down the street in a plaid suit, white belt, cowboy boots and a tuba. And you have to ask: what were you thinking when you got dressed this morning? Are you here for revenge, or for flair?

When I conceive of dishes, there are many times why I will sometimes stay within the confines and flavorology of a specific country or culture; I will not sort of audaciously mix southwestern with Parisian and Czechoslovakian in one mix. There is punishing tendency in many menu-makers today to take us on sort of a forcible rollercoaster of countries within a single dish that makes me nauseous. So we don't do it.