Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions with Joshua Pinsky

Great roast chicken, fresh baked bread, butter, and salt.

In my younger years, on birthdays my dad would always ask what I wanted. He’d always try to be around for it and he’d always barbecue some ribs or brisket, and I remember one year he grilled a big T-bone and it was my first T-bone. It probably wasn’t perfectly cooked by any means or anything, but just eating a big steak with a salad and some grilled zucchini was his thing. My birthday was like, Dad’s gonna grill me something.

Feeling like you're being taken care of, some level of luxury, whatever that is to an individual. For me it’s feeling like I’m getting what I paid for. But luxury is little things: temperature, lighting, the tone of the people there, the staff and the guests. I think fine dining makes you feel relaxed and calm. I do think food isn’t what specifically designates fine dining by any means. I think it’s all the other things. You expect the food to just be good at every restaurant you go to. I don’t think it needs to have a one thousand dollar plate, but if you’re paying one thousand dollars, maybe the plate should cost that. But I don't think food is the most important part of fine dining. I think it’s the feeling of being there and feeling comfortable in your own shoes.

These are things I want to continue working on. Retention, employee retention and guest retention. I love everybody who works here and I will always do whatever I can to keep people as long as possible. So creating that working environment for them, seeing them every day, a level of balance. And then the thing that everybody wants. I want good reviews. I want good tasting food. I want good flavor. And then the last one is better practices in every aspect, in me as a person, as a manager, as a leader. And I want to be better for the environment. I had a talk with a very important chef to me, that is a very sustainable chef. And he said something I thought was very wise. He was like, don't stress about trying to be the most of it. If you think you’re going to be here for ten years, and if every year you do one thing better sustainably speaking, then you're on your way to doing ten times better than anybody else. That’s how I think about it.

Le Doyenne outside of Paris. It looks beautiful, I would just love to go there and have a nice quiet meal. Somni in L.A., it just got three stars, it just looks like a wild restaurant. All time favorite I want to do is The Sportsman, it’s a small restaurant outside of Whitstable, east of London. It’s right on the water and he does a bunch of different kinds of oysters, cooked and raw. It’s a seafood spot and it just looks like the perfect place to sit over the water and have too much wind blowing at you. Addison in San Diego, as far as fine dining, it just looks magical. Disfrutar in Spain is actually a magic trick of a restaurant. I have no idea how to wrap my head around it, so I think that would be cool. I want to eat turbot at Elkano in Spain. Everyone I know has gone and I’ve just never been.

Simple and intentional. Every piece of thing that’s on a plate that was executed or manipulated or cooked is intentional. And then something I used to say a lot, it was a term that a guy who worked for me would say about life and things like that, but I think it makes sense as food. You wouldn’t know it was there, but you’d miss it if it was gone. Even though the food here looks and seems very simple, it’s not. There’s a lot of flavor and thought, not even thought, thought’s the easy part, but the actual technique that goes into a lot of these things is not simple by any means.

Chicken, pizza, taco, in that order.