Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions with Gabriel Kreuther

There needs to be foie gras involved, there needs to be caviar involved, and there needs to be very good wine—I love Bordeaux wine and wines from Burgundy. Those are the elements.

When I grew up as a little boy, we had foie gras twice a year. Once was on Easter, once was on Christmas. When it was on Easter, I had my pastry chef uncle there, as we were about a dozen around the table, and we had foie gras with truffle in the middle. And I would go from one place to another and I wanted the black dot inside, I wanted to eat the truffle. Some people gave it to me. And also when I used to do tarte flambe with my father in the old wood burning oven. He passed away in ’85 so I was young when we did that.

I think it’s either good dining or bad dining. Fine dining makes it too distant for people to grab it, and makes them feel that it’s not for them, or they don’t belong. I think that anyone who likes to eat and likes to have something good, belongs there. It used to be that if you didn’t have on a suit and tie you couldn’t go to a place like [my restaurant]. I used to say to my mother, “Why do I need a tie? The food is not going to taste better.” It feels good when young people are coming to the restaurant. Evolution needs to happen everywhere, it happens in music, it happens in art, and it needs to happen in food. But still, the pendulum went so far with molecular cooking that today, now, the true cooking is being put forward again. And people want something good, and they want to understand where it comes from.

Well, I’m on my way to opening a second and third place. Both of them are in Hudson Yards. One will be less formal, more brasserie, but mostly cooked on an open, wood-burning fire, with an open kitchen with counter seating. And the second place will be a café for breakfast and lunch, focused on high-quality, not quantity. And I want to highlight the egg there, eggs done the right way.

I never had the chance to eat at El Bulli, but I would have loved to have access to it.

To highlight the product, give justice to the product, do not overwork it. The biggest work for a chef is to source a product in the right way. We have a responsibility for our ecosystem and sustainability, and it comes on us to teach the younger generations to use the product to the fullest extent.

Tomato and a Camembert, a glass of red wine, and a crunchy baguette. The other things that I love is a can of sardines in olive oil—I remove the olive oil and replace it with salsa from Trader Joe’s and I eat it with a fork.