Jesus Perea – Pastry Chef Cosme

Jesus Perea has created desserts at some of New York’s finest Italian, French, Scandinavian and modern American kitchens.  He is now the pastry chef at Cosme, Enrique Olvera’s first restaurant outside of Mexico City, where he has created the most talked about and instragrammed dessert of  the year.

 

Can you tell us a little about where you grew up and how you got interested in food?

I grew up in the Bronx (New York) and I first started cooking at home. My mother worked and wanted to make sure we were fed well, so she started teaching me to make tortillas and kept going from there.  

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Where did you get started?

My first job was at Rosa Mexicano, then I went to Le Cirque, Aquavit, Le Bernardin, Del Posto, The Elm then to Pujol in Mexico City and then came back to New York when we opened Cosme.

Have you always been a pastry chef?   

No, I started in the kitchen, but got interested in pastry because I loved the science behind it.

Who do you consider a mentor?

Working with Michael Laiskonis at Le Bernardin taught me a lot about how I want to work.  He touches everything and every night, he stayed until the last plate went out.  I really respected his dedication.

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Enrique Olvera really seems like a benevolent Father to the team here.  What’s your experience been like working with him both in Mexico City and here?

The kitchen at Pujol and the kitchen here are totally different.  I mean we have fun at both, but things are much more organized here.  

It’s been said that Enrique is against using sugar and wants to take dessert off the menu at Pujol.  Is he serious and how do you feel about that?

It’s true, Enrique doesn’t like sugar, but Mexicans like sweets and people order a lot of dessert, especially at Pujol.  It’s way more than they do in New York. .

Cosme is certainly the only Mexican restaurant of it’s kind in New York – What do you think the the rest of the world should understand about Mexican cuisine?   

Mexican food is all about slow cooking and flavors.  When you make something like mole, there are many ingredients, but you should be able to taste each one.  That’s hard to do and really hard to find outside of Mexico.

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Any new dishes on the menu that you’re excited about right now?

Right now I’m making a chocolate covered marshmallow – called Bubulubu – Instead of the usual almond sablé base, we do chocolate and are using cherries.  Because they are perfect right now.

Your Corn Husk Meringue is was one of the most talked about dishes since the restaurant’s opening and probably the most photographed dessert of the year.   How did the idea come about?

It was a few things, La Gran Via is a bakery in Mexico City, famous for meringues. Enrique and Daniela (Soto-Innes, Chef de cuisine) grew up with that.  We used that idea as a starting point.  Also, we knew we wanted to use corn, and make it not too sweet.  And  Enrique hates waste, so I thought, what could I do with this corn husk?  So I charred it and added little by little and it took a really long time, until we were happy with it.

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Photography courtesy of Evan Sung

 

Evan Sung – Photographer

Evan Sung is an accomplished food, lifestyle and travel photographer.  He is also a great friend of ours and when we realized that many of the photographs used on this blog were his work, we thought it was high time he had a feature of his own.  You can see more of his work at www.evansung.com

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Can you tell us a little about where you grew up?

I grew up here in New York City, I was born on the Upper West Side and grew up on the Upper East and Upper West Sides as a kid.  But I have lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn for the last 10 years.

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How did you get interested in food and photography?

I think I’ve always enjoyed food, but food as a professional pursuit didn’t really happen until after college.  I picked up photography late, right at the end of college, just as a hobby that a friend introduced me to.  When I got into it more seriously, I studio-managed and assisted at a stock photo agency (Comstock) for a few years.  In 2003, I moved to Paris and found work with a photographer, Giacomo Bretzel. He did a lot of travel, food, and lifestyle stuff – we’d go to shoot stories in Italy, Germany, Spain, Monte Carlo, all over – stories about Iberico ham or Italian Olive oil production. That’s where I really started to appreciate food and culture and travel in a way that related to the work of photography.   We always got to eat well and travel and meet people exploring the culture of food production and I loved it.

When I came back to NY in late 2004 and started shooting restaurant reviews, first at The New York Sun newspaper, and very soon after, for The New York Times, and I just started to learn a lot more about the food scene, and the food scene was really changing dramatically around that time.  I don’t think I had a huge food culture background, although growing up Asian American, you’re eating tripe and snails and all this stuff growing up.

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How did you first get started?

So I didn’t really touch a camera at all until the end of college, when I met an artist. His name is Shelton Walsmith, who is a painter and draftsman, photographer. Really  multidisciplinary.  And we became good friends working at Shakespeare and Company.  He and his girlfriend and I all became very close.  He was the first person to put a camera in my hands.  It was an old twin lens reflex camera, a Yashicamat 124G.  Kind of like a Rolleiflex – you look down into the glass and the world is reflected backwards at you.  It always looked very cinematic to me looking down into that piece of ground glass.  I asked him how it worked and he started teaching me the fundamentals of photography.  We would go out on the weekends just taking photos.  They had a darkroom, I would sleep over at their place and we’d print late into the night.  Sometimes, I’d be printing so late, I would just fall asleep among the chemicals!  That was how I first got exposed to photography.  Then there’s a whole side story about pursuing an advanced degree in comparative literature.  I started down that road, but it just didn’t feel right.  In 2000,  I decided to leave my graduate program and immediately started working for a stock agency called Comstock, as a studio manager and photo assistant.  I did that for 3 years then moved to Paris for two years.  When I came back to New York I was shooting anything and everything for a while.  But in 2005 started shooting for the New York Sun Newspaper and the very first thing they assigned me was a restaurant review.  I’m pretty sure it was the original [Momofuku] Noodle Bar.

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You came of age at in the food photography at a fortuitous time!

I think people have written about it already, but that 2004/2005 year was when so much changed.  Both in the food scene in New York and food media in general.  With Eater and the idea of food photography changed a lot because people were blogging, and there was this whole niche that opened up, whereas before, food photography was a very specific discipline with only a handful of people shooting cookbooks and stuff like that.

Do you have to approach food photography different from travel or fashion?

I haven’t done a ton of fashion since I got married, I took that season off and cook books were starting to become a bigger part of what I was doing and food was always the world I felt most comfortable in.  So I’ve take a pretty long hiatus from that.  Although there were parts of it that I really did love.  It was meeting and photographing creative people.  But the fashion world was not really my natural environment although they all love to talk about food, like most people!

People ask me what my style is and in a way I try to be very responsive to what the situation is. If i’m shooting something that is very architectural and sophisticated in its plating, then I’ll treat it more like a graphic kind of still life.  But for traveling in Senegal and people are just sort of have these bubbling vats of stew then that’s something that’s very rustic and I approach it from a looser, more documentary point of view.  For me it’s dictated by the environment and the situation and not necessarily trying to impose a particular style on any given situation.

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Getting back to restaurant reviews, what do you know about it before you go in to shoot?

I wish I had a more exciting answer, but they definitely do a good job of keeping the editorial and art sides separate.  At the Times for example, any photographer who shoots those reviews gets a call the week before the review is scheduled to run.  Usually the day of, they’ll ask if you can you shoot that night.  Sometimes a night in advance, but usually it’s a pretty last minute thing.  And that’s it.  That’s about all the advance notice that I get.  Then you never know what the review is going to say.  You get a list of the dishes that the reviewer wants shot and any particular details that they think are interesting, but you definitely don’t know the end result of the review.

Now you’ve shot for the New York Times for reviewers Frank Bruni, Sam Sifton and Pete Wells.  Is there a difference between shooting for one versus another?

When I started at the Times in those Bruni years, in the beginning it was always one photo.  Usually of the interior space in service.  This is all about how food media, and really, the internet, has changed and evolved.  I remember they starting ask for more photos – and they started with these audio slideshows with Pete Wells interviewing Bruni about his reviews.  That was something that kind of started while I was shooting.  But that definitely evolved over time.  It really started with just hanging out trying to get that one good photo.  Now you can be there for a while.  For a Times review I’ll hang out longer than people might expect.

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Traveling around the world with a roster of great chefs is many people’s idea of a dream job.   What’s your favorite aspect of what you do?

Definitely working with creative people is fun.  I always learn something from the people I work with.  I’ve been lucky to work with people who have very distinct ideas about their own creativity.  I like responding to that, I like collaborating with them around that, and helping to make what they have in their head look as good as possible.  Every time I shoot a book or work with a chef on a project like that, my first question at the end is always, “Does that feel like you, like what you had in your head or how you envision yourself?”.  For me it’s very much about trying to respond to what my collaborator has in mind and then if it does feel like them, I feel that’s successful.

Lately the projects that I have been lucky enough to travel for have been great.  Traveling with Michael White in Italy was amazing. He is so immersed in that culture, having cooked there, grown up there, learned there.  It is really like being with an Italian person.  Mexico with [Alex] Stupak or Spain with Katie Button and Félix Meana, all these chefs are taking what they learned in their life experience and have brought it to the US and tried to express their version of it.  Whatever it is that they are trying to recreate in a way and for me to be able to accompany them and see that and live that with them a little bit gives me a new perspective on them and a different perspective on the food and culture itself. Traveling with a person from that country or really steeped in that culture is so much different and more rewarding than traveling as purely a tourist.  Just to be able to be with someone who knows the ins and outs of it, you just learn so much more. The travel aspect is really important to me and I try to find those projects as much as possible.

And I think I just like the world of restaurant people.  The world of chefs is so hospitable.  I like the little network of people that just springs up from knowing a handful of people, you get connected to other people and I’ve definitely experienced it first hand where people are really just so generous in their extending a welcome to you even if you’re just a friend of a friend.  It can feel really genuine and heartfelt, so that’s nice.

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It’s so true.  Is there a recurring frustration or challenge you find in your work?

There are challenges, but they feel like challenges that are so specific to a photographer, budget can be an issue sometimes and people’s expectation of where you can conduct a photoshoot.  Shooting a cookbook, I think there are so many things that are important in addition to the food.  The propping and the styling and using all those other elements to tell the story of whatever the chef is trying to express.  I think chefs in general look a lot at cookbooks and see just the food.  They are looking at how it’s presented and they don’t necessarily look at the plate, or what the plate is sitting on.  Sometimes it’s a challenge to express that to a chef.  It’s not just a photo of this beautiful food that I want to take, but I want to make a beautiful image that has some depth and texture to it.  It’s not just your food on a white plate on a stainless steel pass.  There have definitely been cases where chefs really get it.  Like oh, let’s have more variety of surfaces, more interesting plates, then there are other chefs, not that they don’t want it, but they don’t think about it.  Only through the doing of it, by bringing a prop stylist on board, they slowly start to realize that the food is working with that whole environment to add something more.  That’s maybe one thing that I’ve seen come up with cookbooks in the conversation stage, explaining to some chefs why paying for a prop or food stylist can really be beneficial.

How often do you use a food stylist?

For chef-driven projects not so often, usually I trust the chef to present the food the way they want to.  I have enough experience that I can tell them if something feels off balance or needs to be replated in someway.  But generally, on chef books, the chef has their own team and distinct ideas on what it should look like.  From there we collaborate in terms of tweaking things.  It’s pretty rare that I’d have a real food stylist involved in that part.  I do put a lot of value on the contribution of prop stylists.  I think that’s pretty huge.

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Any upcoming book releases you want to tell us about?

I’m very excited about Chef Alex Stupak (of Empellon)’s book. [Due out October 20th] That was really a good challenge because it was all tacos.  Chef Stupak has a whole dialogue about what a taco means to people:  What people think it’s worth and what one can do with it.  When the project came up to me, I think as a photographer you worry about a taco book that it will all be crushed up limes, and a Corona, and colorful Mexican textiles – just “Mexican” in that cliched sense.  But of course, that didn’t feel right for Alex – his background and his intellectual thinking about the food – so I looked to do something more unique.  I wanted to think about the tortilla as a canvas and Alex and his team would treat the taco like that.  I think it’s a really delicious-looking book, but it also reflects Alex’s thinking about Mexican food and treats it in a way that is respectful of the complexities that Alex is trying to tease out of it. Jordana Rothman wrote it and she’s a wonderful writer and they’re great friends, so I think they will have a unique take on it from a writerly perspective. That project was fun and we had a lot of creative freedom on it and Alex is just so smart, so I’m excited to see it come together.

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Any favorite restaurants in New York?

Im pretty open to a diversity of experiences.  Chef Paul Liebrandt’s Corton was always such a great, exciting restaurant, I still regret that that’s gone.  But the places that I’m a regular at and always satisfy would be Khe-Yo, or Bar Chuko, or a place in my neighborhood that I go to all the time Sushi Katsuei .  Or the Breslin , just to go have a beer and a lamb burger. Robertas, Spicy Village , Upland …. I don’t know… The list never ends…

 

 

Ryan Roadhouse – Chef Owner of Nodoguro

Ryan Roadhouse, chef owner of Portland’s Nodoguro restaurant was recently named Rising Star Chef by Portland Monthly Magazine.

How did you first get interested in food?

I have always loved eating good food. I was born to very young parents, which allowed me to spend ample time with my food obsessed grandfather. His days seemed centered around making sure dinner was a memorable event. One of my first elementary writing assignments turned into an explanation of the perfect ham and cheese sandwich.

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How did you first get involved in Japanese Cooking?

As a teenager. I loved the idea of working in a restaurant. The first restaurant I worked in was a Japanese restaurant. My first day as dishwasher/busboy ended with one of the kitchen guys pouring me a beer, eating Japanese curry for staff meal, and a server handing me 20 bucks. I was pretty impressed.

What was your experience like living and working in Japan?

Sleepless and amazing. The experience began so completely foreign, but quickly became comfortable and familiar. I am still inspired everyday by the experience of being in Japan. The culture, the food, and the people have changed me forever.

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How did Nodoguro come about?

It came about out of necessity. I had a particular vision for the type of food and experience I wanted to share with people, but making it a reality was difficult. Most conversations with investors led to the instantaneous compromise of my concept. It became clear that in order to avoid stagnation and continue to grow as a person and a chef I would need to go at it alone. It began with making a seed plan with a local farmer and made Nodoguro a reality as a pop-up restaurant.

What were the greatest benefits and disadvantages to the pop up format?

The advantage of popping up is that you can take risks and test an otherwise untested idea with minimal risk. The downside is that it’s a pain in the ass! Cold storage problems, commissary kitchens, sourcing issues, having no designated space. Unpacking your “restaurant” on the day of service, packing it back up after service, and probably many other disadvantages that I have forgotten already.

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How would you describe the food you’re creating at Nodoguro?

Kind of like Kappo cuisine with no rules and lots of surprises

How do you approach dish development and choosing the themes for your menus?

Themes are now crowd sourced (for the most part). I find that it keeps me honest and makes creativity a necessary component of my daily life. I always have a general format in mind for each menu. Everything else is detail shaped by limitations.

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Although your cuisine is rooted in Japanese techniques and ingredients, it seems uniquely Portland.  Can you tell us about some of the more exciting ingredients you’re working with right now?

Right now the farm is in a stage of seasonal rebirth. Lots of the Japanese herbs are naturalized now and begin to reassert themselves. We have a variety of plants that are being utilized in in the flowering or seed pod stages. We have naturalized benitade, shimonita negi buds, tender nira, karaine seed pods and flowers, komatsuna raab, fresh calendula, Japanese frill mustard flowers, wild currant flowers with things like local salmon, sablefish, and super tender beef tongue.

Essential kitchen tools?

Being a pop up chef has made me a lot better and more resourceful. A sharp knife is the only thing I can’t do without.