James Beard Award-Winner Kelly Whitaker on Why You Should Keep a Line Cook Mentality

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk Bachmann: Hi everyone, my name is Kirk Bachmann. Welcome back to The Ultimate Dish. Today, we have a special guest: Chef Kelly Whitaker.

Chef Kelly is celebrated for his innovative, zero-waste cooking and creative menu development. This year, he and his wife, Erika, were honored with the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur.

Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma – and that’s where he is today – Chef Kelly fostered a deep connection to food while spending summers on his grandfather’s vegetable farm. He went on to earn a hospitality degree from Colorado State University (just up the road from here in Boulder) and gained invaluable culinary experience cooking in many world-renowned restaurants off the island of Procida in Italy.

A few years later, Chef Kelly moved to Boulder, leading to the launch of Basta – my favorite – renowned for its wood-fired, farm-based Italian dishes. He later open Wolf’s Tailor in Denver, which was named one of “Bon Appetit’s” top ten best new restaurants in the United States.

In 2019, he launched Dry Storage – my wife’s favorite, right here in Boulder – followed by BRUTØ and Hey Kiddo in Denver. Chef Kelly also founded the Noble Grain Alliance, promoting domestically milled-to-order grains.

Chef Kelly’s outstanding contributions have earned him numerous accolades, including Chef of the Year by Eater Denver, the Heart of the Collaborate award, and “5280” magazine’s best Chef. In 2019, he also received a James Beard Foundation nomination for Best Chef: Southwest.

Join us today as we explore Chef Kelly’s secret to balancing a thriving career, discover how his travel experiences inspire his menus, and delve into his efforts to redefine the traditional kitchen environment.

And there he is from Oklahoma! Good morning, Chef. How are you, buddy?

Kelly Whitaker: I’m doing really well. Yeah. I’m joining you from Oklahoma. We had an amazing night doing a dinner at our newest project, Nonesuch, with Chef Byron Gomez last night. I can’t say enough good things about him and what happened, and actually what’s happening in the city right now. Thanks for having me today. I’m coming off a really fun night. It’s so great when I get to be in the kitchen and then have a post-conversation because it was truly an inspiring night. So, again, thanks for having me today.

Basta: A Neighborhood Restaurant

Kirk Bachmann: Timing is so perfect. Serendipitous for us, for sure. I’m still out of breath on the intro. There’s so much more. Like we were saying before the show started, we’re so, so fortunate here in Boulder to have you and so many others that brings such thoughtful food and experiences for the people here in Boulder, Denver. Our guests, our tourists that come to town.

Tickled to have you on the show. So appreciative. Can’t believe how crazy-busy you are. I can’t continue this conversation without wishing you and your wife Erika congratulations on the James Beard Award, coming off of all the Michelin accolades. Can I just say from a very personal perspective – I’ve got to do this. My wife will be so disappointed if I don’t. She’s a big, big, big, big fan. Her name’s Gretchen. She’s at Dry Storage almost daily. Our pantry is filled with the flours. Thank you for that. She’s so happy. Can I just say that Basta in almost an emotional way, Chef, got us through the pandemic. Got us through the pandemic. I don’t know how many times we came for the lasagna. You guys were so upbeat about everything with the masks. You came out in front with the bags. We forget about it because it’s a little bit in the distance, but thank you. Thank you for that. Really, really, really, really, really important.

Kelly Whitaker: Thank you. Thank Gretchen. Shout out to any of our regulars in that sense because Dry Storage was just meant to be just that, what she described it as. I’m there every single morning. I try not to rub my team the wrong way because it is my favorite place to hang out in Boulder, and I don’t want to ruin my environment there. I walk very carefully in that restaurant. Thank you very much.

Basta, being one of those neighborhood places, our team was just so locked in. When that happened, they just went to work. That’s the beauty of a neighborhood restaurant versus some of our other fine dining. Basta just really stepped up in that moment and just became that for my family, too. Thanks for acknowledging that because a lot of the team that was there during that time is still the team now. It’s insane how much that team stays together. It’s incredible.

Kirk Bachmann: Not to just say this because you’re on the show: you’ve got the recipe down. We’re aficionados. I run a culinary school. My wife’s a chef. We love good food. The pizza crust is insane. It’s just really, really, really good.

We were there the other night, and we got such a kick out of this. We came in. We had our kids with us. There’s that little white bench. It’s a little bench with a white cushion on it right by the bathroom. Our favorite gal – I never remember her name – but she almost always takes care of us. Server, bartender, she’s kind of everywhere. Has auburn hair.

Kelly Whitaker: Caroline.

Kirk Bachmann: Yes, exactly. She’s amazing. She’s like, “I need you to sit on the bench.” It’s the big thing now. When we get to Basta, it’s like “I hope they don’t have a seat for us because I really just want to sit on the bench for a minute.

Kelly Whitaker: That’s where I sit.

Special Moments Around the James Beard Award

Kirk Bachmann: It’s just hilarious.

Can you take us back just a little bit? For those in the food industry it’s like winning an Oscar when you are recognized by Michelin or the James Beard Foundation. Can you describe your emotions, maybe Erika’s emotions, that night, that moment when you received that award, and how you shared that with so many great team members? What went through your heart?

Kelly Whitaker: I have a unique relationship with James Beard because, of course, my first nominations were as a chef. That’s just kind of where my head was at. Last year, we were on the long list for restaurateur. I’m going to be honest: it just didn’t sit well with me. I wasn’t like, “Restaurateur.” Of course, my staff, everyone was like, “That’s what you are.” I’m like, “Oh, okay. That’s what I am, I guess.”

I’ve always taken on the mindset of a line cook. We’ve always been sort of back of the house first, leading with food. That’s been our mantra in building Id Est. When we opened Basta, my daughter was one. She’s sixteen now. My first thought on the restaurateur was like, “Some of you are going to come with us. We’re going to go to Chicago.” She was like, “Really.” I was like, “Yeah.” We dragged her around the first seven, eight years trying to build a company. Those are the things I start thinking about in that category. I wasn’t thinking about my time cooking in all these random countries or doing that. I just thought about: we build this family business.

We never thought about that in the beginning. Erika was in retail and worked for American Apparel: Los Angeles. When we couldn’t get some things to work, she said, “Let’s step out and let’s make a run at this other thing.” We founded Id Est in 2010, but really we just founded Basta as a neighborhood restaurant. Even at the time, we weren’t thinking of a group. Something like this was just so far off in our thinking.

It was an amazing weekend because as soon as we made finalist, I had already committed Saturday to working with Marc Vetri on Alex’s Lemonade. I’d been waiting for this ask forever. It is one of the most special, most impactful events. So when Mark asked me, of course I was like, “Yes. A hundred percent.”

Then we made finalist, and everyone was like, “Oh, you’ve got to be in Chicago.” I was like, “There’s not a chance I’m going to Chicago and missing this. This is too important.”

The Beard Awards are on Monday, and on Saturday we did – Erika and I – flew to Philly and we did that. It was just impactful. Actually, one of my last line cook chef jobs was Providence in Los Angeles with Michael Cimarusti. He was there, and Denato, who works the front of the house was there. I spent the evening talking to Chris Bianco and all these legends. Very relevant chefs today. I was just so inspired. I think they raised $500,000 that night for childhood cancer. It was just incredible.

Then we hop on a plane. We go to Chicago. Then Caroline, who is our amazing director of hospitality and beverage, she flew with our daughter up to Chicago. It wasn’t a big thing. We had some friends show up, which was really neat. It was kind of low-key, but I didn’t go there and was thinking, “Let’s go to this party,” or “Let’s go do this.” I really had in my mind that I just wanted to come in, lean into this moment, get this award, and go home. A lot of these things, you just get caught up.

They are so hard to win, too. I don’t think people fully understand what some of these awards entail. Some of my heroes have been on the list for over ten years and never had that moment.

I was on a couple of years for Chef and regional, and then getting the long list. I made finalist the year that it was right in the middle of covid. I was part of the canceled class, if you will, of that year because they were going to do a remote big thing with James Beard. They had a lot of chefs record their acceptance speeches because it was going to be remote. This New York media company calls and they say, “Hey, we need to pretend like you won.” I’m sitting in BRUTØ filming this thing going, “Thank you for this award.” Then, twenty-four hours later they canceled the awards. I was like, “Whoa!” We never walked the red carpet. We never had that moment.

Being in Chicago, being there in that situation. Really, I could go on about this last year and all the things that have changed at the Id Est and the trials and tribulations, if you will. It was very timely. Being there with Somi, being there with Erika. When you’re sitting in the auditorium, you’re completely terrified. It is one of the most terrifying situations I’ve ever been in. I don’t love public speaking on a microphone necessarily. There is a lot that is in your mind. When you’re in the awards, they’re not passing out champagne. They’re not passing hors d’oeurves. There’s none of that. You just sit in there for two hours. You’re super clammy. Your palms are sweating. You’re just losing [it]. You’re really stressed out.

Somi had asked me earlier – my daughter – she said, “If we win, are [I] going up?”

I was like, “No. You’re not going up. Don’t worry about that. Nah. Not a chance.”

Then three minutes before they’re announcing us, “Oh, by the way, you’re coming up with me.” I didn’t want her freaking out the whole time, too. We were sitting there as a family. Again, so much has been about me as a chef and me as this and me as that for a decade. To be there, in that moment, we’re all holding each other’s hands.

Paul Kahan is on stage. He’s one of the greats. He was actually in Philly, too, which was so cool. I’d never met him. He’s such a person to look up to in a career of being a chef and restaurateur. I saw him in Philly. He actually told us he was presenting.

I said, “Oh, for what?”

He goes, “Restaurateur.”

I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

He did this thing at the table. He said, “Let’s put our hands in the middle and do this little [thing.] I’m going to call your name.”

If you really look, there’s a moment where the envelope opens, and he smirks. That’s when Caroline was sitting next to me, and she goes, “We got it. We got it.” She saw him do that.

You really don’t know how it’s going to go. You can’t make this up. We know the impact of the moment. We know the gravity of the moment. We understand how hard it is to win that award. We understand the people. Danny Meyer was the first recipient of that award. Thomas Keller was like the third. I know that they all mean different things. They’ve handed out nineteen of these things, but when you really understand the stats of this industry, I think so many times we look at this and we’re not totally understanding who came before us, and who laid the foundation for some of this work. What are they doing now? How are they impacting our community in restaurants?

For me, it really hit home, the gravity and the responsibility of an award like that for our group. For all of this – even Michelin, everything – for us it’s always about how we take this and build from here.

We love recognizing the work, of course. And of course, you recognize your team. We wouldn’t be here without them. I think I said we founded the company, but we didn’t build the company. We built it with some really beautiful humans and some amazing people in this industry. You don’t build a company on your own. You can found an idea. You can cast a vision. You have all of that, but immediately, I was like, “What can we do with this?” [That] became my next thought.

Without skipping over it, the moment, that’s what it is for us. How do we use this to leverage this in a way that’s going to be impactful. Whether we’re working on grains or all the things that we work on in sustainability.

What a moment! Erika! I think it was Erika’s coming out moment, for me. She actually does a lot better with the public speaking and stuff. I was like, “Your name’s first. Why don’t you just talk?” We had a couple notes. She went completely off script! She grabs the mic and is looking at the whole crowd. I’m standing next to her, and Somi’s just bawling and crying. It’s so emotional. She’s like, “If you’re having issues in your company, maybe you should hire more women.” I was just like, “Wait a second!” I really was so proud of her. I didn’t even know how to take it from there.

When we both got off stage, we were both like, “What did we say? Did we thank the right people?” You’re in front of all your peers and all your people, and we just love this industry so much and the people that work in it. Marcus Samuelson running up to us and congratulating us. That’s really cool. But we love the line cooks. We love the people that are trying to make this industry work for their families. It’s the gravity of the moment.

I haven’t talked about it a lot so having this conversation with you right now, I’m still reliving it very much. Because we got very busy after that. I haven’t really talked about it that much. What an amazing moment.

Kirk Bachmann: So genuine. There is so much that you shared there. I do have a couple of questions. You started with leading with food, and I think that is so poignant. That’s so important, right? That’s the message for young people that are trying to get into this industry. Lead with food.

I tell this story all the time about how thirty years ago when you went to school, whether you went to the university or the culinary school, the teachers, the professors, their responsibility was to tell you what they knew. Today, instructors are facilitators of knowledge. There’s just so much knowledge out there.

I love how you recognize Chris Bianco, and Paul Kahan, and the Number 19, and Thomas Keller. Funny, funny. Quick story. Gretchen and I were at Corrida. I think it was either this winter or last winter. We’re sitting at the bar at the far end so we can see everything. She leans over. We had two other friends that were down towards the end towards the windows. She leans over and she goes, “Marc Vetri’s next to you.” I’m like, “No, he’s not.” She’s like, “Marc Vetri’s. Next to you.” She lived on the East Coast for a long time. She knows the Philly vibe and all that. Sure enough, it’s Marc Vetri.

I got chills hearing that his event was so important to you [that] before you’re on the largest stage of your life, that contribution to an event that raised a bunch of money for an incredible cause. That’s what it’s like to be a chef, a restaurateur, a great boss, a great husband, a great partner. So, so thankful that you shared that.

It kind of leads me into: you mentioned Erika a couple of times. You mentioned family. Your daughter, who’s now sixteen, but grew up in the business. I, too, grew up in my parents’ business. I get it. I get that we had to wait for them to come up from the bakery on Christmas Eve because it was the busiest day of the year. We’re just used to that stuff.

I guess the question is – I read an article that Erika said, and I quote, “All things are possible: to have restaurants, to have family, and to get involved.” It sort of says it all, right? The million-dollar question for all of our listeners is really, how do you guys do it? How do you continue to do it? Now you’re reinventing yourself yet again in Oklahoma.

Embracing the Fluidity

Kelly Whitaker: Yeah. That’s exactly right. In general, we love the lifestyle that hospitality and restaurant can provide, whether you’re staging and cooking somewhere in the world, you’re working at a hotel in Val Resorts or something. There’s the lifestyle component to it that we started to embrace early on. The love of the game is real.

Yes, all the stories are true. Of course, the struggles – it can be a really brutal industry, obviously. For us, it’s the fluidity of it. We’re not necessarily trying to filter or come home and clock out in a sense of it’s five o’clock, or it’s six o’clock and we’re not supposed to talk about work. That hasn’t been our mantra. It’s not about being able to turn it off because it’s very fluid in our lives, and we embrace it. So there is that struggle.

To be honest, again, having her with me. We talk about how we would do this again. She gave up her career to found a company. I didn’t found this company on my own. She has her own stake in and her own thing. There’s moments when you share in it. But how do you share? In the beginning, it was just incredibly rough. You want to talk about working with your partner in that sense.

I think it’s about the fluidity. I think it’s the enjoyment of the lifestyle. At some point, we’re creating flexibility around it for our family, too. When covid hit, for example, there are many, many partners in the world who weren’t able. They were working two jobs, and then all of a sudden your kids are out of school, and all these things. How do we manage this? We were fortunate enough to have this. “You go here and do this, and I’ll do this.” We were able to make it work.

I think it’s about fluidity and not just trying to clock in and clock out. I’ve really embraced the good and the bad of the industry. That’s how it flowed through our family.

My daughter, at this point, is almost at the CEO level of thinking because – well, we can talk about her grades another time – but …

Kirk Bachmann: Same with my kids!
Kelly Whitaker: But when we’re talking about life, operating agreements, corporate structure, these are things that I don’t necessarily treat my kids like kids. We don’t necessarily totally filter those kinds of conversations. I think they’re incredibly important whether she’s a part of this business or not. They’re growing up in that with us as a unit, as a team. I think that that’s really important for whatever family structure you’re in to subscribe together and be together in that. Again, make it a little fluid.

And we have each other’s backs. They know if I’m gone or on the road too much and doing those things, they’ll keep me in check. It’s a real having-each-other’s- back thing. In the beginning, it’s really hard, and we’ve gotten way better at it in that balance. We learned a lot.

Obviously, there is a huge shift in our industry. In my own mind, where the greats of the world – the Chris Biancos of the world – they stand in front of the oven the whole time. When I got my chance, that’s exactly what I do. I just stood in the apartment complex at Basta forever. Seven years. I had never had a job that long. I’ve had stretches of working 300 days and more. When Basta opened, that was it. That was the only choice. I couldn’t hire another chef, and I just worked. Yes, I did that, but I don’t think that’s the same mentality now.

I think, fortunately for us, over the last decade, our industry has shifted. What I think Erika was referring to was that it’s possible now. We understand it. We can actually teach it on some level, and we can hopefully inspire others around the idea and the notion that you can do these things. And yes, all jobs, entrepreneurs, it’s not just a category of us, but it is in a category a little bit different than it was ten years ago. I do think it is possible, and I think that’s probably what she was referring to when she went completely rogue and started professing these things to an amazing crowd of people.

Kirk Bachmann: Who I’m sure really appreciated it.

I was imagining our kitchen table. In our house, there’s just one table, and it’s a really big one. It’s in the middle of the house. That’s kind of where everything happens, from homework on one end and dinner at the other. This whole idea of leaving it at the door, it’s just never really worked for me. Oftentimes, my children now, a little older, and Gretchen, provide me with some perspective that isn’t so tunnel vision. I’m here involved with the school and people’s dreams every single day. Oftentimes, I need some other perspective. I need family to interpret what’s happening. They often have just incredible-

I’ll give you a perfect example. You’ll get a kick out of this. We have a film studio in downtown Chicago. It’s a really cool area. It’s River North. It’s not terribly far – in fact, it’s right down the street from where they film “The Bear” and all of that. We did this little investors event not too long ago. I was trying to figure out who I know in Chicago that can show up, pair wine with what we’re preparing that night for these twelve investors. I was just really struggling with it. I get home, and I tell Gretchen about it, and she’s just like, “Why don’t you just call Bobby? Isn’t Scarpetta in Chicago, too?” I’m like, “God, I’m such an idiot! Of course!” That’s what I did. Scarpetta showed up and they crushed it. But I was so wrapped up in it and the perfection of what it needed to be that I just didn’t step outside of myself to see such a simple, simple solution.

Chef, the Michelin Guide referred to you – it’s the ultimate comment – they called you a “power player in the Boulder/Denver culinary scene.” I would enhance that, maybe the United States culinary scene. This inspiration for your many restaurants now, from what I read, really ties back to some of the time that you spent in Italy where you fell in love with the simplicity of wood-fired eateries and the joy of taking care of your guests in this – like Basta – it’s a neighborhood.

I’m just curious: if you wouldn’t mind sharing for our listeners what that experience was like when you were Italy in Europe. Do you have any wild stories? Did it all come together at one point? Where you were like, “This is what I need to do in Boulder, Colorado. This is it.”

Italian Influence for Basta

Kelly Whitaker: Italy for me was so early on. I spent two separate stints in Italy. It’s incredibly informative to how I started the group. But there were a lot of whys. As strategic thinking more about how to make a business work, Basta itself became very situational for where it was at. When I started Basta, I was thinking about Da Michele and these places in Naples and outside of Naples that had bomb holes in the side of their buildings. They’d been through two wars. I was like, “This is going to be a battle,” is what I was thinking. I sort of went back to that and said that something that could actually survive in this location because I know this is going to be a ride. I had no idea it was going to be that kind of ride.

My first entry was actually pretty nice and romantic. When you hear, “Oh, I’m going to go cook in Italy,” and you’re like, What’s that like? I was going to school in HIM in Switzerland, in Montreux. I finished that up. My chef at the time from Fort Collins for this Italian family was working in the Naples/Campania area. He had said, “Hey, I can get you this little stage. It’s a couple months.” I said, “That sounds amazing.”

So I finished up school, and I hopped on a train and went down to that area, and then hopped on a boat and a bus and a car. Eventually made it to the island of Procida. I went across to the other side of the island. I sat down, and Giovanni was there. I looked at him, and he looked at me. He spoke zero English, and I spoke zero Italian. We just stared at each other, which was super awkward. I didn’t understand what I was getting into. It was a very small and simple restaurant. Obviously, just pulling whatever out of the water. We were very slow. He showed me some things. I would go in and prep and cook, and he’d be like, “Okay, we’re good now.” I was like, “What do I do now?”

I did this for a couple months, and it was incredible. It’s so beautiful. The three little islands off the coast there, Capris, Ischia, and Procida. Procida is the little one. It’s not as popular, but it was just a really cool moment.

I came back to the United States, I finished my degree, I moved to Oregon. At some point, I felt the need to go back. That was something that I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I went right inland from Procida. These little towns, it was just north of Naples, and helped open a restaurant called Divinum but this became the first thing to build my mental framework for being in a kitchen. As well as, I wanted to be in an area where there wasn’t a slow food organization. I wanted to be where slow food was born. It was born in Rome. It was born out of this idea that they put a McDonald’s in Piazza Square Rome, or something, and all the Italians were super mad. They were like, “We’re going to do slow food, not fast food.”

I was not far from Rome. Later, looking back, from there I was really always in a kitchen where there was sustainability or impact at the core. There was no organization, there was no prescribed sustainability. I wasn’t in a restaurant going for a Michelin Green Star. It was a restaurant, and everything came from the back of the restaurant. That’s where I wanted to be. I wanted to see that. I wanted to live in that.

But living in Naples is not an easy thing, especially as an American. You know if you’re from Milan and you want to work in Naples, they will not let you most of the time. You can go there. You can take a class. You can do pizza workshops. There’s a lot that you can do, but to go there, live there, and survive there? What it turned into was like a game of survival. I was really determined to open this restaurant, be in it, and not look back.

I worked for about a year, a little over a year. I worked for no money. A lot of wood-fire ovens are in the front. If you’ve been to Basta, that’s really what it feels like. There’s an oven in the front and you’re making food. You can’t do that there as an America because the diners would see you working there, and they wouldn’t eat there. They would reject the restaurant. They would not go there. I was told on Day One: do not show your face. Stay in the back because if I’m cooking the regional food of that area, and that’s just how Naples is. It sounds like a New York edge or something.

Once you get in there, I fell in love with the people, and I fell in love with the region. There’s just a beauty there that you have to be in for a bit because a lot of people go to that area and think, “Aw, it’s so gross. It’s so dirty.” This or that. They all have these opinions about the Napolitana and the Naples culture. I really came to love it. There were some really amazing people that took me in.

But it’s not what you would expect. For one, it was one of the coldest years in Naples. Vesuvius, the volcano there, was covered in snow. There are places that don’t have heaters. That was super uncommon. Now I’m in a room, and it’s leaky, to get very dark very quick. I’m using my stove sometimes for heat, and there’s bars on the window. I’m thinking, “This could start a fire. If this happens, I’m not getting out of here.” It was just cold. I’m in chef coats that I need to wash every day because I’m working a lot. It’s the same thing. You go to the store, and of course you see all the clothes lines between the buildings. It was too cold and too humid. You walk into my place, and there are strings all over the room. I’m hanging chef coats, and I’m scrubbing them in the sink. This went on for a year.

I had no return date in mind. I felt like I was going to stay until they said, “Go home.” That’s actually what happened. One day, the chef, the owners walk up and they said, “Hey, you’re leaving in two days.” I was like, “Amazing.” I could have bailed. I could have left. I think about it all the time. The way that I was developing my mind around food and integrating into a community like that, it really set my mindset for how we do travel and get into communities. Whether that is in Jalisco or Copenhagen, or whatever. Our group doesn’t necessarily just eat and take from the community. We always carry this value of what we can give and learn. What do we have to make this an exchange versus we’re just here to go to the next meal at Noma.

Working like that, it set a lot of early intentions for me. Fast forward, I went to Alain. I got into the Michelin world, the fine dining, and the brigade system. That’s a whole thing. But when I opened Basta, there was something about the simplicity like you described. “Man, this is going to be really tough. I don’t know how I’m going to survive this opening.” You don’t know how many people have come back to me over the years and said, “Hey, I was going to work with you, but I never thought you would make it.”

Still, the fact that Basta is there in that apartment complex, a lot of people showed up. Nobody showed up for the first year, first of all. That was a one-guest-at-a-time thing when we started Basta. Them telling people, and our amazing industry in Boulder that would come and eat and go back and tell – if they were working at the kitchen or another restaurant – they would go back and tell their guests.

I had it in my mind, a couple things. I was in Los Angeles when downtown was starting to be this thing. Everyone was like, “abre aqui abajo?. What’s opening down here?” There were these projects. This apartment complex, I thought, Okay, I can do this. This can be cool. Again, I was completely wrong. A lot of people didn’t want to cross 28th in Boulder. They lived close to Charles Street or something. People just drove around the complex getting lost the whole time. We weren’t on maps. It still happens today. People still don’t know how to find Basta.

But there was something in my mind. You’re in these places and these regions in Italy and you go down the road, you go over the hill, you go around the corner, you walk down this brick alley. You do this thing. Okay, destination restaurant. Let’s learn about there.

We started with lunch. We started with dinner. I was just working all the time. I think it was Danny Meyer setting the tables. “If you don’t have foot traffic, maybe you shouldn’t do lunch.”

I was like, “That’s smart.” So I’m teaching myself. Basta became the ultimate master’s degree in survival and how to make a business work. Looking back, it was true.

The Naples informed in these restaurants that have been around forever really embodying what it means to be in service of the community your in became the foundation.

I loved making wood-fired pizza. I didn’t learn that in Naples. I actually learned that in Los Angeles when I was consulting for a small family from Naples doing a pizza place on Sunset and Hollywood intersection. I was working at Providence at night and needed to make some extra money. These guys were like, “You lived there for that long.” Yeah, I can write your menu. Because I’ve eaten at it. To be honest, I never got to make pizza there because the ovens were in front of [the house.] There was a Hispanic community of chefs there that were just like, “Dude, we’ve got you. We can make the pizza. Well teach you how. You do everything else.” I was like, “Cool. That’s a great exchange. I also want to be able to grab anything from the Santa Monica market and throw it in your wood-fire oven.” They were like, “Cool.” “Okay, we have a deal.” I actually learned pizza from that community, which was interesting.

Basta became so many things that have informed us. I thought at ten years we were going to move on. That’s what we started to do with our other projects, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it a little bit, but I was ready to use it as a building block for us to figure out what we were going to do with the group. But for the first time in years, I didn’t think about anything else. I just stood in front of the oven. I just cooked. There wasn’t a day you could come into Basta and I wasn’t standing there.

Kirk Bachmann: I don’t know how many times I wanted to come behind the bar. Gretchen was pulling on me. “He’s busy! He’s busy.”

Hearing you talk and having been there so many times, I know that it must have been so difficult. Everything you described makes such sense. No one wants to go past 28th. Black Belly’s down there as well. When you pull in, whether you park over by Dry Storage and you walk around, or you get lucky and get a spot right in front, it just fits there. It just fits in that corner. There’s the little walkway. It’s a nice complex. It just makes sense.

Did you mention as you were talking and you left Italy, did you drop into Oregon? Is that what I heard?

Mini Gaps in Oregon

Kelly Whitaker: I did. As soon as I graduated in Fort Collins, I went up there. Again, I’d been in Switzerland. I’d been in Italy at that point. I really wanted to leave Colorado. I had some friends in Bend, Oregon. I went up there. I consulted a few places, but I also would take these interesting gaps when I was cooking. Again, when I do something, I go all in. If it’s food, five hundred days working in a kitchen isn’t far. I’m not afraid to go there. I wasn’t. But I would treat myself to these little breaks.

For me in Oregon, there was a little mountain, not Bachelor. It was called Hoodoo. It’s right outside of Bend. I went there and I just would work in a rental shop. I love snowboarding, and I love being on a mountain. Right out of high school, I went straight to work for Vail Resorts because they had employee housing at the time. You just had to pass a drug test. All of a sudden, you didn’t need a down payment, and you got a job. Some of my friends had done that from Oklahoma. That’s exactly what I did the day after I graduated. I went up there, and I worked every position – bellman, valet. I always thought if the restaurant thing didn’t work, I loved that environment of the hotel.

I really eventually landed in that hotel/hospitality genre because it’s the other secret side life of being in a kitchen or building a restaurant. I realize how hard it is to start a restaurant. So I went to Oregon, and I found a rental shop> I would just take those little gaps for myself and spend time doing that, and then I would return to food in some way.

For me, I loved Bend, but I kept finding myself coming back to Colorado. There’s a boomerang effect. Even from Oklahoma, coming back to Oklahoma. My boomerang effect was always back to Colorado. I love Colorado, but when I was in Bend, there was just a moment where I was like, “I’ve got to go do something food.” I had been there for a year or two. My thought was, “I want to go back to Italy. I don’t know how.” I started calling some people, found out about the restaurant opening, the place that I eventually worked at, and then went back to Italy.

That really set off my culinary journey. That was the start. It eventually took – well, Erika eventually took me to L.A. She was working out there. She graduated Colorado State as well. That was a weird [time.] Not weird. I just wanted a break from school, wanted a break from Colorado. It was a lot of fun. What a beautiful community.

Zero Waste and Sustainable Sourcing

Kirk Bachmann: I love the boomerang analogy. Oregon was my boomerang as well. I went to the University of Oregon. Bend is beautiful. I’ve got two other children that still live in Oregon. That’s where I did a little bit of my hospitality stuff as well, at the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. We were in Bend last summer. Bend is a lot different than Bend was twenty years ago. You can have a direct flight, drop right into Redmond. I grew up in Chicago, but I went to high school and such in the Gunnison/Crested Butte area. I was getting chills with you talking about Vail Resorts and working with the area. It’s a certain sort of vibe that I absolutely agree with and love.

Can I just say, this morning, as I was putting some finishing touches on the amazing amount of questions I have for you, I couldn’t believe how – I’m just going to say – sexy that site is. It’s monochromatic, super sleek, very attractive. I won’t read the whole thing, but I’d love for you to spend a little bit of time on this ethos. The website talks about your commitment to excellent guest experience, and environmental impact. You talk about how the restaurant kitchens, your restaurant kitchens and bars focus on supporting regenerative agriculture ingredients, zero waste, and that you prioritize social sustainability. You talk about culture and the well-being of all involved. It’s really, really well done. It’s feels genuine. It feels like it’s kind of “who I am.” I imagine your response is going to bring everything full circle from Italy to L.A. to maybe Oregon even a little bit. It’s really evident, Chef, that you’re committed to weaving sustainability and sustainable practices and zero waste in everything you do in your cooking. How do you develop an ethos like this?

Kelly Whitaker: It’s always been around, whether you care about local sourcing or where food comes from. The great restaurants that are not just simply transactional like a fast food restaurant or something, and even they are thinking about that. The Danny Meyers and the Shake Shacks.

I think it’s important that everybody develops a driver. For me, I have so many. I’ve been called out a few times about how many issues we’re trying to tackle in our industry, but I just decided at some point to take up the fight on a lot of them. I have the energy for it, but part of it is I didn’t like the things that were coming to the front door of our restaurant, our kitchen. We were facing so many issues, whether it was the oceans.

At the core, it really comes to the people, though, because human sustainability is what we think about the most. I think that gets overlooked when we’re planting all this grain and we’re doing all this regenerative ag work. It really has to come back to humans and protecting our ecosystem, whether that’s overworking issues, or work-life balance, or sustainability for our farmers. I just felt like, at the core, it really comes down to: is this business viable for people and planet? I think if you said, “What’s your ultimate quest?” I think it’s to prove that.

You can look at Id Est’s website. You can look at some of the work we’ve done recently on the Wolf’s Tailor website and BRUTØ. We’re taking a different shot at how we’re presenting the work to the world. A lot of groups aren’t investing in a website. We have great reservation platforms. Most people just get on their phone; they book a table.

We are starting to try to share the work in a way that creates curiosity around some of the work. It’s so hard for me to toe the line any more with what we’re facing in the industry as a whole. Then, on the other side of that, your whole business is people spending real money in our restaurants. You don’t want them leaving with some really sad Netflix documentary in their mind about how the world is melting in so many ways. We all know food is political. Water is political. Producing food on so many levels is just different. We’ve all realized in one way, whether it is a documentary or something like where we’re at right now.

For me, each one of our restaurants has taken on certain issues in different ways, and then there are some through-puts between what we do. On the Wolf site, there’s a moment where you scroll down, where creation becomes destruction. That’s a moment. The idea that you have a farmer standing in a field, or a chef, and they’re walking through. We’ve all seen this commercial. We’ve definitely seen it in the world of bigger companies and granola, or whatever is on the soup can. We don’t realize that the farmers, some of the statistics out there are insane. They have one of the highest suicide rates in the United States as an industry. The volatility of crops in that industry, but we’re painting this farm-to-table picture.

We’re so lucky in Boulder because we have amazing farmers. What they do. We’re so lucky to have that little small ecosystem because it is a bubble. It’s not the reality of the food in all of Colorado and the food scarcity sometimes.

How do you, as a chef or a restaurant, portray something? I don’t necessarily want to prescribe to the idea that all is well with our industry. How do you translate that message in an optimistic or positive way in the restaurant itself. I think about it a lot, and I think that’s where you’re seeing some of this abstract brand and website and development. We’ve got a group that’s helping us co-design a lot of these ideas in Wunder Werkz. They’re some great friends, and they’re actually partners in some of the restaurants now.

We realize the power and the voice of the chef more than anything. That was taught to me early on. I’ve been lucky to go to a James Beard Boot Camp where they teach you about policy change. A lot of this stuff, I had the idea and I wanted to be an impact, and I would follow impactful chefs like Michael or Quinn Hatfield, who was cooking straight from the market, or the grandmothers in Italy. I consider them their own little form of protest around the world of food because they refuse to give in. They will kick out a fast food restaurant very quickly in some of those areas because they are protecting food and protecting the sacredness of indigenous plants and seeds and seed savers. There’s a lot of that. I love that.

I feel like that voice of a chef that I’ve been able to hone in on some of these issue, again, like I said about the award, it creates a sense of responsibility. I would say that anybody that’s starting in this business: take care of the business. Take care of your family. Make sure you’ve got food on the table.

That was my first thing. We weren’t paying ourselves for so long. We took one of those routes. That was step one for me: surviving. Once we started to turn a corner, expand, I always had it in my mind. I was an impact chef. I followed impact chefs. I wanted to be an impact chef. More to be a really great chef because nobody cares about your ideas if you’re cooking bad food. It’s cool to grow grains, but if you don’t know how to make a delicious piada with it or piece of pizza or pasta or something, then it’s kind of lost work.

Kirk Bachmann: You have to lead with the world.

Kelly Whitaker: So we did that. Again, honing in on my voice. I just wanted our projects to represent, always, an idea, always a focus around this work. It’s complex and we take on a lot of issues. I feel, at the core of it, is proving the viability and sustainability of a restaurant. It means “What are you paying your people?” It means “What is truly sustainable for people’s lives?” It’s not just does a business work. Does your P&L drop profit at the end of the day? The question is, does it drop profit with all of these things in place, with lowering your footprint, and thinking about waste, and being able to work with these farmers with their ingredients and not just a commodity thing. When you put all that together, all these issues, that’s really the proof of concept, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do.

I’ve been on this quest to prove that this industry can be viable and sustainable for people and planet, at the core.

Each Restaurant is an Individual

Kirk Bachmann: So well said. So well said, and such a good lesson for our students. I really appreciate it, and I agree. I love it.

We took a little bit of a detour, but I’d love to talk more about the restaurants. We mentioned Basta, your first baby, Dry Storage, Hey Kiddo, OK Yeah. Incredible Instagram page, by the way, with the drinks and stuff. Really cool. BRUTØ. Wolf’s Tailor. Is there a line or a through-line, Chef, that runs between all of them? I’m going to assume many of the things we’ve been talking about today are at the core, the foundation of everything you do.

Opening a restaurant is no small feat. To open many restaurants and take care of so many people…when you think about that one common denominator across all of them, is there one thing, too, Chef, that you wish you would have known before you opened them? Would you do anything differently?

Kelly Whitaker: With a little bit different thought around your question, one of the things we don’t do is approach every project the same way. I don’t treat BRUTØ thinking necessarily the same way we treat the thinking at Hey Kiddo or The Wolf’s Tailor. One way we approach these, if I was an author writing books, I really wanted some individualism throughout the way that they work. Do we have standard operating procedures? Yes, there are some. There are some foundational – just like what we talked about today in terms of sustainability. We want to approach each of the ecosystems as ecosystems.

We’re trying to set the petri dish so that you know that you’re getting the good malts. You’re getting the koji you’re getting these things that are incubating in a positive way. I think that’s been our through-put is to set an environment intention around some of the ideas. The people that work within them and make sure that something’s not just coming from a corporate overate. We really look at each thing as it’s own living, breathing thing instead of just looking at it as a collective of the same thing.

The opposite of that, but that is a through-put for us. It’s a through-put for us to allow them to grow by the people that shape them. I think that’s often overlooked because, just like all humans, we all think and act differently. To try to box that up, sometimes, I think is a negative for the industry. It’s a natural thing to want to go in and say, “This is it.” But we do learn a lot by doing this as well. It can also create a lot of confusion and chaos at points, too. We’re getting better at understanding it, but I think that us taking a different approach and not over-managing each one of my kitchens in a certain way.

I feel so blessed, and I am actually just so grateful to be able to come in with the different teams and be able to go into Dry Storage in the morning and talk to Holly about her bread. Set the idea about what we’re doing there, fermenting. I’m lucky to have Mara King, who’s our sustainability director and fermentation. I’ve put this mindset in her, too, because she’s going around and she’s fermenting all the little things. We’re talking about how do we not waste this, how we create these systems for HACCP [Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point]– if listeners don’t know HACCP, there’s a lot of regulations around this, and we want to be above board with all our practices.

We approach everybody’s project in that way, developing that mindset in each one. They each speak to a different thing.

When I started BRUTØ, I was already doing a lot of stuff with rice and wheat. I wanted to take on corn, and that’s what it became about for me. “I want to work on corn. We’re going to open this simple cafe” that is obviously very different now with the Michelin and a Green Star, and all the things that we’ve been able to produce there. I wanted to look at corn, and I wanted to have a nixtamalization product and learn about it and try to get corn activated in the community more. I was thinking about masa. That’s where my head was. It wasn’t, “Oh, I want to do something from Mexico.” I’m not from Mexico. I wasn’t trying to do that. A lot of things were created out of trying to solve something, and then having the opportunity to do so. I think that’s how we approach everything.

Each space is different. Just because one thing works really well over here doesn’t mean it’s going to work over there.

And you’re right: that can be very challenging. It’s hard enough to come up with one concept. I think that’s been the gift of Id Est and the way that we approach it because we’re inspired by so many things. At the core, we know that if I grow up in Oklahoma and I didn’t grow up in Japan.

Many people are like, “Oh, but you make koji.” I was lucky to work with Chef Deuki Hong on Hey Kiddo. It’s very crossed into Korean flavors. People don’t understand; they’re just going to label us as fusion. They don’t understand that the sour gochujang and the company was a product that we took leftover bread. We were like, “What do we do with this?” Mara was like, “If we can get some gochugaru and stuff, we can grow koji on the bread and create our own gochujang.” That got pulled over to Hey Kiddo and the tasting menu.

Some of the work. We wouldn’t know that if it was just, Clock in. Don’t think for yourself. Put you in a line. Put the standard operating procedures. We’re a group that’s sort of unhinged in that way, so our through-put is really listening to, not just our own stories and our own travels, but the people that work in Id Est. We’re so lucky that, again, they are sharing their ideas and their passions and their love for what it is. We’re not a group that, “Kelly’s the chef, so this is his work.” Every time I’m in an interview or something, giving credit where credit is due is very important. I give our chefs all the credit in the world for the things that they’re creating and doing. I think that’s a real empowerment moment for them and their career because I’m not trying to own their work; we’re trying to celebrate it and lift it up and give them a space to create.

That’s really probably the through-put.

When it comes to the work, we’re not necessarily overly auditing our kitchens. We know how hard it is to produce food for sixty people a night at the Wolf’s Tailor. That’s what we cap at. If you, if you take ten courses by sixty people, six nights a week. That’s a ton of production. We know how hard it can be in there, so we do try to create the environment where that can be under control. We’re not down there going, “You’re not doing this.” I know the challenges of running a kitchen. From that perspective, too, we’re empathetic to the situation. I’m a line cook. I know the challenges of that. It is how we approach things.

We’re getting better at it. To open an Id Est project, you’ve got to be ready because my chef Jonah, at Hey Kiddo. At 28 years old, I think he’s one of the most talented young chefs out there right now. Incredibly gifted. I think Hey Kiddo and what he’s doing there is putting out some of the best food in the country really. With all the waste and the fermentation and the kimchis, all the things that we’re producing there are insane. He has the energy and the mind to go – we call it Chaos Kitchen sometimes because he can bounce from one thing to the other.

We had to find someone like that because the way we tend to do it is we throw everything at it. A lot of groups won’t. They want the perfect formula out of the gate. We were like, We’re going to try everything, and then we’re going to refine, and then we’re going Kaizen which is just the art of continual improvement. We think a lot about Kaizen and how it’s one of the most relevant ideas to start almost any business, but especially in our business. It really resonated with us with how you stop and address the issue versus working through it. We kind of take that, and we refine it, and we continually mulled it into Hey Kiddo.

You said something earlier about our pizza at Basta. Oh, it’s so good. We’re still changing the recipe! We’re still developing. It’s been thirteen years. Everyone’s like, “You’ve got a great pizza,” but we’re still making those small changes at Basta that the guests that eat there all the time are like, “I noticed.” I see that.

Know the Rules You’re Going to Break

Kirk Bachmann: We judge and compare everything we eat and do in the world of pizza to Basta’s pizza. To Basta’s crust. It’s often when we’re there and I watch. A couple weeks ago, the young man. To watch him just manage that oven opening, ducking underneath. It’s like a symphony. It’s unbelievable.

You said something that really resonated with me. I have to check myself at the door sometimes to make sure I do that. You said that you love to start your morning at Dry Storage talking to Holly. Hearing Holly’s voice about what Holly’s working on and getting her impressions on fermentation or her bread or whatever it is. That is so important.

Can you tell that we’ve done our homework? I’ve read another article where you said that your employees are something that you really deeply care about. You said, “We’re redefining what a restaurant kitchen can look like.” That’s huge, right? To you point earlier, through the pandemic, even before the pandemic, the industry has changed a lot. Our rhetoric, our narrative, our critical thinking with our students has changed a lot.

Is there anything that your 28-year-old chef that’s just really crushing it – is there anything that a culinary student or someone just a student of the craft can do to best prepare themselves to – two part question – work in the industry today, and then to work for a group like yours today?

Kelly Whitaker: The first thing I would say is there is so much change coming. I think we all know this. The other day, Erika was wanting to grill corn with the husk on. She was like, “Oh, do this.” I was in the middle of work. I’m at the table with the computer, and I’m like, “Just go on chat and just ask.” We had just gotten a bottle of something from one of Noma’s new pantry items.

I asked chat, “Hey, give me a recipe in grams with the husk on with one of Noma’s new products in grams.” It just immediately said, “Use the mushroom garam. Mix it with the butter. Peel the thing back. Take out the silk. Rub the butter on, and you can throw it on the grill.” In three seconds it laid that out. It’s going to be very, very different how we’re thinking about recipe development and all these things as a young cook. There are a lot of things.

First, I would say one of those ideas of [knowing] the rules that you’re going to break. Look at the history again, and don’t skip. Don’t just go past understanding the brigade system in a kitchen to fast forward to whatever it is you want to put on Instagram. That is the product of ideas. I love the world. I love that we have access to some of these kitchens to see what they’re developing and creating across the world. It’s so amazing that we have that tool now, but I think you can’t start to disrupt, which is what most places are going to do right now. They’re not going to follow the brigade necessarily. Each station isn’t going to be a thing. A lot of those blend together, and they already do, especially in Colorado. We’re not talking about France; we’re talking about here.

I think really understanding and understanding the brigade, understanding kitchen culture, understanding setup, breakdown – things like that – are the best places to develop because I do believe that when you understand that, you really can cook anywhere. A lot of the jobs that I got or a stage or anything wasn’t because I was a great cook or I had mastered some technique. I would go in and I would make sure I was the person that could close the best and organize and think about my mise en place and be able to arrange that. This idea has carried me far.

I got into a role this year of really running the restaurants. I’m not going to stay in this lane forever. I’m going to get back to impacting creativity, but I really wanted to think about this system of how the restaurants run and really get in it. It’s the same with cooking for me. I’m just putting my head down right now for this year and really trying to really understand it to disrupt it. To say, like you just said, I want to rethink about how these kitchens work. I want to think about restaurant economics work.

I want to think, Why do we keep repeating these behaviors? The second covid happened, everyone was like, “Thin margins. Let’s help restaurants. Let’s go save them. Let’s do this.” Because it is very true about our industry, but yet somehow we keep showing up and doing the same thing every day and running a restaurant the same way with this three percent margin at the end of it, if you’re lucky. Then going, “Cool, let’s do that again tomorrow.” I’m like, “Why are we doing that?” I’m focused on this task. I’m setting a goal at the end of it. I’m saying, This is the time I’m going to give myself to trying to master this moment.

To my point, you really need to understand the function of a kitchen and how things work because if you want to go stage at Single Thread or go anywhere. Again, I’m speaking to some fine dining, but none of my paths of staging has been Michelin and a hundred percent fine dining. I wanted to be able to work with families in China in a little dumpling shop. I’ve chosen a lot of neighborhood places to be at to understand how communities think and work, and integrate in that.

The understanding of brigade, the understanding of the people that came before you – it sounds old school, but I think it’s really important and relevant to understand that so you can know how to disrupt that, know how to break that or bend that, or know where you are heading in your own career. It’s very rarely about the end plate; it’s how you got there. To do that, you need to study that.

Just like Emily, my amazing pastry chef, she worked with Thomas Keller at French Laundry. She’s just doing an exceptional job with us. This week, she actually went to Providence and staged in Los Angeles. She just knows how to walk in and be respectful. I love it when someone would call me and say, “Oh. We had Emily out here. She was amazing. She didn’t just come out again, take some recipes, go. Whatever. She had conversations that were contributing.” We want to inspire. We want to give back. I think when you know and understand how those things flow and work, and you get there with the right mentality of being grateful, but really understanding this system, that she could walk into a two-Michelin – hopefully three this year. I think Providence very much deserves a third star finally. I can’t wait to see that happen.

But I think it’s really important as a cook to be able to walk into an environment like that and not just fall apart. That comes from understanding the system more than understanding how to cook. I think that’s super important. And it’s driving me and how I think about running a business now. I’m lining up my mise en place, and I’m putting them in a row, and I’m setting up things, and I’m setting up my station, and I’m really taking that perspective into Id Est right now as a cook. I’m not touching food right now. Again, I’m giving myself this block of time where I really think it’s important for me to really think about how we’re managing and how we’re thinking. So I’ve given myself to this moment, but so much is coming from the cook mentality. I think there is so much we don’t even realize we’re learning as we learn to master this craft or cook. Again, this is incredibly relevant to all. It’s not just fine dining. I think understanding that’s important when you’re going through school and learning these things.

Chef Kelly Whitaker’s Ultimate Dish

Kirk Bachmann: So well said. I took unbelievable amounts of notes because I can’t wait for this chat of ours to go live. There are just way too many positives and great words of advice. The scenario of walking into another organization, another restaurant, another kitchen, with respect and have a conversation. Give something back. That message, by the way, Chef, all credit will go to you, but that message is going out to my faculty today.

You have been so unbelievably gracious with your time. We’ve gone well longer than we deserve, but I cannot let you leave until you answer one other additional question. The name of the podcast is The Ultimate Dish. We love to wrap up with most chefs talking about motorcycles, music, or food. If you had to select one ultimate dish – it could be a memory. It could be something you shared with your family. It could be something you ate one day in Italy or Switzerland. What would that be? What would be the ultimate dish from Kelly Whitaker?

Kelly Whitaker: There is a through-put and a legacy of the piada bread. It’s so funny. It became a thing. It’s hilarious because now I’ve got Chef Byron Gomez, who is just incredible to work with right now. I’m just having such a good time with him. He’s such a charismatic. I’ve never worked with – he hates it – a celebrity chef. I’ve never hired one. It’s been cool because he comes into BRUTØ, and the bread is on the menu. There’s no requirement to keep piada on the BRUTØ menu. I’m not making this happen, you know.

He can’t take it off! That’s the funny thing. I tell him-

Kirk Bachmann: And he shouldn’t!
Kelly Whitaker: Take it off and make something better. The bread is on Wolf’s. It’s at BRUTØ. It’s at Basta. It was founded at Basta just by accident. It’s something that I think has sort of been copied.

You know how I know it’s copied? It’s mentally trademarked, this bread, because you do see versions of it out there in the world now. Obviously people were doing this in some version or another before me. It’s very rare to find food that hasn’t been done on some level. But “piada” is a made up word. I made it. When you see piada on a menu that is not an Id Est restaurant menu-

Kirk Bachmann: I did not know that! How funny!
Kelly Whitaker: Piadina is an Italian flat folded sandwich. Somewhere in my mind, I thought “piada.” I was looking in all these history books, and I thought, “I’m going to call this bread piada.” Then, when “Bon Appetit” was writing about us, I called all my Italian friends and I was like, “Dude, they are about to write about this in a national publication, and I made it up.”

They were like, “Kelly, just roll with it. Just go with it. It’s fine. Yes, it doesn’t exist in what you’re talking about in Italy.” I wanted someone to say I got it from somewhere. It’s kind of fun. It’s so simple, but it’s become this representation of our grains and our work. Again, at the end of the day, it has to be delicious or it just doesn’t matter. The deliciousness of that bread.

I love seeing the chefs change it up and put different sets with it. “The New York Times” last year called it one of the fifteen best in the United States. It was at BRUTØ. When Michael and I have been cooking at BRUTØ and brought BRUTØ to life. Michael Diaz, he’s an amazing local chef – he was like, “I’m going to put this with white mole.” I was like, “Wow!” That, again, ended up in “The New York Times.” The bread that we serve at Basta is kind of a through-put, so I have to draw that out and get recognition to that moment.

It’s been celebrated, but more than anything, it’s homey and comfortable and delicious. There’s no micro-grains. It’s just bread. It’s just three ingredients. Nothing could say more about how I think as a chef and the statement you can make behind one little, simple piece of bread. Nothing simple in terms of milling flour and growing all this grain with all these farmers, and setting up a mill that takes all your profits. This story could go on and on about how that bread came to life. But at the end of the day, it’s three ingredients, and it’s beautiful, and we can’t lose sight of the simplicity of something like that, [something] as simple as the piada bread.

Kirk Bachmann: It’s the perfect answer. During our chat, a friend of mine, Paul Cure – you might know Paul. He’s great. I said, “I’ll call you back later. I’m chatting with Kelly on our podcast.” His only response was, “Save me some piada.” Literally, on the phone.

Kelly Whitaker: Exactly. Exactly. The infamous. That is so fantastic. I love that. I love that.

Kirk Bachmann: And thank you for listening to the Ultimate Dish podcast, brought to you by Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Visit escoffier.edu/podcast, where you’ll find any materials mentioned during the podcast, including notes, links and other resources. And if you can, please leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, and subscribe to support our show. This helps us to reach more aspiring individuals ready to take the next step toward their dream careers. Thanks for listening.