Chef Mark Miller on Food Today

Southwestern Cuisine's poster child on what's wrong with Venice, the Food Channel, Alice Waters, Michael Bauer, Whole Foods, San Francisco chefs and Starbucks…and why he likes San Antonio, Spain, Sicily, Shanghai, Jeremiah Tower, Santa Fe and cookbooks.

An Exclusive Interview by Shirley Fong-Torres

(Pictured above Shirley Fong Torres and Chef Mark Miller)

Contact Shirley at wokwiz@aol.com

Find out more about Shirley Fong-Torres at www.wokwiz.com

Shirley Fong-Torres: What's up now on Coyote Planet?

Mark: Actually, don't forget, I opened Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley several years before Coyote Café in Santa Fe. It's now 20 years next year since I opened Coyote. I have done nine books and I continue to work as a consultant, too. In San Antonio I try to make things closer to Hispanic and Mexican traditions, which is more the culture here than in Santa Fe, where it is more based on Native American and probably later European traditions.

We have been well supported here by the native Hispanic population. That's unusual. In San Antonio the upper- and upper-middle class Hispanic business community is more responsive to local traditions such as game. I consult with Jesse on that. We like to keep the game dishes on the menu, and I come here two or three times a year for special events. Cinco de Mayo, Valentines dinner with all chocolate (Lobster with cocoa foam starter), and Day of the Dead.

SFT: Where do you usually hang your hat now?

Mark: I have two places in Australia now. I closed my Las Vegas place, my ten-year lease was up. and MGM is not a company you tell what to do. The lease agreements are tough and unusual, you are only allowed to have three employees who are non-union. Michael Bauer was complaining that it's not like New York or San Francisco, but it never will be. It's not the chef's fault if he can't hire the people he needs to hire. It's the union's.

I don't do restaurants anymore so much as I do consulting. I work in Phoenix for P.F. Chang's -- remember he had Lombard in SF, which was ahead of its time. I think in terms that an extension of Southwestern, or any cuisine, must be true to its tradition. We don't bring soy and ginger into a cuisine if it's not part of that traditional cuisine. I might borrow a technique from other cuisines, but I won't borrow flavors. I am not about to bring in French spices or Asian spices. I don't do fusion. My background is in anthropology. I used to teach at Berkeley.

SFT: What is your focus here at La Cantera?

Mark: If you look at weavers, when the Navaho were first exposed to aniline dyes, they created something that had never been taught to them. They were part of an older tradition. That is what I try to do here. It's probably closer in spirit to its roots. Mark Twain wrote about the chile ladies in San Antonio. Most Americans remember chile…as not that old, only 40-60 years back, whereas the tradition goes back much, much further. Texas was Mexican for 300 years before it was part of the USA. San Antonio food was very definitely based on Mexican traditions, not northern European traditions as in so much of the USA. There's very little Native American here. They didn't settle here, so they didn't take on the agricultural traditions of Native Americans in New Mexico or Arizona.

The cattle drives ran through here, destroying most of the native American grasses as they moved up the trail. No need to go into that, but the whole point of Texas was conflict over grassland. The Mexicans wanted to have large ranches here, to raise cattle because you can't do that in Massachusetts.

SFT: Tell me some more about what you personally bring to the table?

Mark: I have a diverse background. I have a degree in philosophy and aesthetics. Sung Dynasty painting… I worked in Paleolithic shamanism. I taught culture of Japan, psychological anthropology. And I taught cross cultural aesthetics.

SFT: What was it like way back when, didn't you work for Alice Waters in the early days of Chez Panisse?

Mark: I never worked for anybody. I always owned my own restaurants. I worked at Chez Panisse, Alice was one of five owners, and she was one of three people in the kitchen, Jean Pierre, Alice and myself. She did one course.

Going back, in my academic career days at Berkeley, I lived in Morocco and Indonesia doing field work. They wouldn't accept my doctoral thesis on the development of the aesthetic personality. I needed funding, because in anthropology you need a lot of funding. So I applied to Columbia and was accepted. In 1972 I wrote a newsletter called the Market Basket. There was a little food community of people who had come from university backgrounds and moved into food businesses. When you get disenchanted with the politics of a university, you think about moving on. Victoria was the first person at Chez Panisse. Alice was only the fourth person that cooked there. During the nine years that she was there, it was Paul's menu mainly. Chez Panisse is guided by her philosophy, but, for instance, when Jeremiah (Tower) was there he wasn't influenced by Alice. A lot of people may not like his personality, but that guy is a culinary genius, a master.

I worked for awhile in Napa Valley, at a place which became Terra. They were friends of mine also. I was asked to take care of the restaurants when they went to France, and I was a good amateur cook. At that time, when you did 40 or 50 covers, restaurant cooking was relatively simple. Chez Panisse was doing very good, relatively simple, food. $9.95 for three courses. It wasn't difficult to cook as long as you cooked it fresh. It was basically Mediterranean, and then Alice said 'Do you want to make salads?' So I made salads for a couple of weeks, and then I went Napa and came back and she said, 'Do you want to work in the restaurant for three or four weeks before you go to New York?'

The influence there was that we wrote a menu every week and everyone got to have input. Jean Pierre, Alice, myself. At that time Jean Pierre was the only professional chef there, he had worked in Paris and Washington. It was like a little co-operative and the food was good. It was 120 people a night and it was $9.95 for three courses. I did the purchasing, I did all the buying, and I was there for two years.

SFT: Go back further.

Mark: I had done physical work all my life. I grew up in the Gaspe Peninsula, and I worked lobster boats and shrimp boats. I strung tennis rackets. And I went to prep schools, and I worked physical labor. This generation doesn't do both things. You either have an intellectual background or a work background, but it was different then.

But the idea of doing simple physical work wasn't unappealing after six years of doing exhaustive research only to have your work presented to one person who didn't like it, and one who did, and not knowing where you stood. If anything, I learned that I didn't have a personality for working for another person. So I freelanced. Chez Panisse is the only restaurant I worked in that I didn't own. I opened 4th Street (Berkeley) as 50% partner. It was my food, we weren't influenced by anyone else. We did mesquite grilling. When I moved to Santa Fe, we did Creole and SW. I was done with European food.

SFT: What's the state of the art today?

Mark: You can still have great simple food. Most chefs today do 'seasonal regional food.' You know what that is? That is not cooking. That is a political philosophy. There are a lot of people who can't afford to buy organic and expensive ingredients. Whole Foods is basically a middle-class life style -- a division between who has and has not. And chefs who only think they can cook with expensive ingredients aren't cooking.

And a lot of it IS shopping. To me a salad with olive oil is not cooking. The transformation of a natural ingredient through a cultural process to a cultural form is cooking. That is an anthropological definition, but it's a true one. It might be good farming or good shopping, but it's not good cooking. That is my problem with Chez Panisse. You don't need expensive ingredients to be a good chef. It's the basis of some good cooking, I have lived in villages where people had no money and they managed to be great cooks.

These guys today don't go on buses to Guatemala, they don't cross Africa, they don't live in Indonesia. They read Saveur, they watch the Food Channel. They want to do nice high-end food, but their food lacks cultural backbone. Unless they are real geniuses, they begin to lose themselves and not develop as good chefs. There are geniuses, but if you are a genius composer you might not need to rely on the body of tradition of western music, but very, very few people want to go that way. People like Dvorak come along, but you really need to depend on a mastery of those basic tools. And cooking is no different. A lot of times, the food is too expensive because the chef is relying on buying expensive products. I don't think that is necessary.

No young chef comes into my kitchen who can make black bean soup. No one, I don't care where they have worked, I don't care if they come from Mexico or if they are Latin American. They don't understand the techniques of when ingredients are put in, when they are taken out, when aromatics are used to flavor something over maybe a 12- to 16-hour process. They just don't think that way anymore. The lady I live with in Guatemala used 36 steps in her black bean soup. It took a day and half. Same thing with weavers, they were very poor, some are great and some are not so great, but it has nothing to do with what they buy, it's their creativity and technique and sensitivity to cultural tradition and what they know and intuit. If you come in and use ingredients as an excuse for not learning to cook, I think it's important.

And the Food Network creates a parallel kitchen universe where nobody ever tastes anything, so we have a lot of virtual chefs out there now. The public today doesn't know what food actually tastes like. They can actually respond to a pretty place and big name chef and think it's great. High-end ingredients are getting more expensive because so many people are being exposed to virtual cooking that they all think they need to have these things now.

I saw an analysis in The Wall Street Journal that Starbucks averages charging a dime more for fair market coffee, but that the farmer gets less than one half a cent of that. They actually are able to charge more for the same product that they don't pay farmers that much more for. I talk to organic farmers in Santa Fe that Whole Foods buys from, and they say they don't pay more for it than they do for others. But they sell it for lots more.

The farmers are disenchanted because they sell a product for 45 cents a pound, and they walk into Whole Foods and its $2.95 a pound. What the hell happened to the other $2.50? Because they take 5 cents out of their $2.50 markup and give it to the community, they can say they are contributing to the community. Sure, but they can also make way more money off of the community. So it's like are they getting more in or more out. I've always been a little bit apolitical when it comes to food, but don't misunderstand me. I like the idea of buying natural. I believe you should support farmers. It's just that too many young chefs believe that it's all you need. That you can't cook without good ingredients. They define California cuisine as using the freshest local foods available that are natural products and seasonal. That isn't what California cuisine is about. Cultures have traditions that are a little deeper than shopping.

SFT: Like where, dude?

Mark: I have been going to Shanghai since 1981. The food we eat today is so poor and antiquated that the Chinese would laugh at us. We are basically eating the food that peasants eat. Italians came here with marinara sauce and poor pizza, you know why? Because they were peasants, they were never exposed to good food. So we thought that that was what Italian food was. It wasn't till later that people traveled and learned better. Rich Italians, rich Indians, rich Chinese, they don't cook. So the Chinese food we know, like the Mexican food, is the market food, the daily food that the people knew in their market.

All cultures have three kinds of food. There is always the home food that is made at home. There is always the commercial food that is available outside the home -- I call it market food. Before there were restaurants, there was market food. People would set up stalls and specialize in one thing. In Japan they were on bridges, you can trace any one thing back to its origin, the beginning of Edo, they wrote down who could do it.

And there has always been what we consider to be class food. Food reifies one's class status, so the ability to access scarce ingredients, or a particular product, gives you the ability to have status or power in a society. People with money and power eat a different food. Part of it is often religious. It is purposefully set apart from normal food.

We have romanticized that this is the food the natives ate in the south of France. Believe me, when the peasants get their hands on truffles, they don't eat them, they sell them. The idea that you might get from a magazine that the peasants are out there gathering truffles and eating them in their homes is not right. We have this romantic idea.

In China today, we see the beginning of the bringing back of complex regional foods. You see farmers today who are eating new recipes that the Communists didn't allow them to eat, because they didn't allow people to do things for profit. So today you see things all these new vinegars, black vinegars, herbaceous ones, that you didn't see 10 or 20 years ago in China. First of all back then you didn't see much of anything available. So now when you see a recipe calling for Chinese black vinegar, the Chinese would ask "From what region, what age?"

There is a new kind of sophistication and it's not Western influenced. China always had this kind of sophistication, but for a long time it was not available to them. A young chef like Jereme Leung at Whampoa Club at 3 on the Bund in Shanghai is doing like $80 million a year - for a restaurant. The Chinese will go in a spend $300 or $400 for seafood. Americans won't do that. People in America complain about prices. Chinese don't complain about prices.

The food we are eating today is culturally backward most of the time in terms of ethnic food. Look at Moroccan food, it's not the food of upper class Moroccans, which requires lots of time. Indian food is similar. A Brahmin family woman's dowry includes the middle chef. So she starts with this chef with 20 years of professional cooking experience. You think that that food is anything like what the normal family cooks? She has access to money and power.

But let's get back to the Southwest. The tradition here was Hispanic, charro cooking, large haciendas and on that they had trade with Mexico City. The priests in the missions brought stone fruits and wine making, they were cultured and civilized, like California was. New Mexico grew more wine than California did in the 19th century. They were well settled.

At Francesca's we want the diner to feel the food has a sense of place that somehow it connects to the tradition. We use lots of game; Michael Hughes from Broken Arrow Ranch is just down the road, so we utilize that. We use their antelope, their venison, wild boar. We use lots of moles. We hope it's more than lip synch. Jesse's family is from here, he's proud of that. Lots of locals are Hispanics who support this place. We do 100 to 120 covers a night and 80% are local. We always have game, and it's always from Texas. We use huitacoche, (a fungus that grows on corn), but that comes from Florida, the USDA doesn't allow it anywhere else -- they are afraid of the viruses and microorganisms getting out into the population. It's an airborne spore, so you need all kinds of permits and segregated areas to grow it, only Florida has them. It's a micro-organism, so there 's no real way to control it.

They sold it at Ferry Plaza this year. We have great porcinis now in New Mexico, I get 300 or 400 pounds a week in September, yet people think they are exotic. American Indians certainly ate them. We knew they had a diet of 600 ingredients, we knew they grew 400 plants, 170 herbs. They had animals. Yet stupid historians come along and say American Indians lived on corn porridge. They had 700 ingredients! You have to be kidding me.

SFT: Isn't mesquite too stinky to cook with indoors?

Mark: Younger trees are too resiny for good charcoal. But commercial hoods work quite well. Mesquite was here before people were."

SFT: Is there bad meat?

Mark: Donkey meat in northern Italy is something that should be forgotten, it's so strong, stronger than goat. I use antelope, deer, wild boar. I use both buffalo rib eye and tenderloin, I use ribs for braising, I do the shoulder for stew. In Santa Fe we might often sell more buffalo ribeye than beef.

SFT: Do you have culinary roots yourself? Are they tangled?

Mark: I created the brining recipes at Chez Panisse. It's part of my heritage. I lived in Guadalajara summers as a kid. My mom was a psychiatrist. For me, Mexican food was far more diverse than what I got back in New England. I have a great taste memory. We always had stew on Sunday and baked beans on Saturday night. My mother and her neighbor alternated bread making for both houses. Growing up we went to homes with Indian and African chefs, wealthy people's homes. I was eating great food. I grew up in an area with Polish and Jewish people, and they all actually kept to their native traditions. Their grandmother would have been Polish-born.

So when I grew up in the 50's, everyone I knew was only one generation removed from great food. It began to change in the 70's people; no longer have those associations because they don't want to have them. Remember the old man who used to do the pigs brains in the Hunan recipe. They cleaned that up. They only use parts of animals now that everyone thinks they want to eat.

SFT: Is Southwestern food's fifteen minutes up?

Mark: There aren't that many chefs doing Southwestern anymore. There never were. There was myself, Robert (McGrath of Roaring Forks in Scottsdale), Stephen (Pyles) and he's stayed at the Mansion on Turtle Creek (in Dallas). It's dying out because it had techniques that demand you know the complexities. You have to go into Mexico and Guatemala to places the Food Channel hasn't been. Saveur magazine has never been there. We read about things we think has authenticity, but it doesn't represent. I've been to places in Peru that you have to ride 7 hours in back of pick up trucks to get to. Food there has not seen food writers.

SFT: Any advice to hot young chefs?

Mark: You want to define an ingredient by creating a counter point by layering flavors with diversity. Flavors do not need to be harmonious, they can to be asymmetrically balanced. There must be balance and contrast between a sauce and entrée, not redundancy. Use wine to create an ambiance and stage for the food. Don't wash away the chef's efforts with excessive tannins. Don't do that.

A recipe is only a suggestion of ingredients. How could one not work, there is no firm recipe for life. We're a demographic age now where there are people proud that they don't cook at all. It's part of their identity. They created this aura, watching Iron Chef or whatever, thinking it's too difficult.

Go to music school, they will require three things: that you play an instrument; that you read music; that you have perfect pitch. If culinary students were required that they have good palettes; that they understood the processes of cooking and chemistry; that they be able to do the physical labor of cooking, there would be better cooks out there.

But what is going with the Food Channel and with Gourmet Magazine changing into more of a travel life-style magazine; it's actually dissuading people from cooking at home. It's no longer about the joy of cooking. The reason I became a chef is that I always cooked and found it relaxing. I was living on $180 a month, so I cooked and I cared about eating well.

Now people think it's too hard. People think it's easier to go to the grocery store and buy something prepared. You can't do that in the amount of time it takes to make a simple meal. Every salsa in my salsa book can be made in just 20 minutes. You can't drive anywhere, buy something and get back in 20 minutes.

My grandmother and my mother were cooks. When I go to someone's home, they are cooking six recipes from a book. They have never been to that country, but they try to cook ethnic food from a book because they aren't confident in their own taste. They follow recipes instead. It's been knocked out of them. The media has done that.

SFT: What would I find in your refrigerator?

Mark: Ice cream - Haagen Daaz. I don't like Ben and Jerry's, it's too quirky. Nitrogen ice creams are not impressive. I have Japanese pickles, chocolate mochi, another Japanese thing. I have shredded pork. I like jerky. I like noodles and soups for breakfast. I eat fish for protein. I have Sierra Nevada beer. I was first restaurant in the USA to sell it. I have Japanese soy sauces, organic Kikkoman, I like tamari soy blends, Korean vinegars, their apple vinegar is good, and lots of mustards. I do grilled meats with marinades. I have oils, but I am not home enough to have many.

I like grass-fed beef. I know the American public does not. I like the flavor. I like extremely well aged USDA prime, but I don't like Niman Ranch beef. I think Uruguay beef, and State Farm, and one out of Florida that does wagyu, it's a 3 or 4 fat scale, good Kobe is at least 6 or 7 and the best is higher. There's only two people cutting beef anymore, so it's 99 % of beef is cryovaced. So it's full of sour blood -- I don't order it. Good restaurants will take it out immediately and age the beef another 21 days. The tenderness issue is that there are two kinds of bacteria, aerobic and anaerobic, the aerobic makes it tender, but you need anaerobic. You need to know where the beef comes from, when it came out of the box, when it was killed. Most places can't tell you, so getting good steak in America is hit and miss. The beef is coded, and they don't tell you the silly codes. We change suppliers all the time because its inconsistent. I don't know why Americans don't recognize the flavor of cryovac because it's awful. They just want it to be tender. Fleming's, all those places use it, with that sour bloody flavor. Fleming's has 20 restaurants, that's a drop in a bucket to Cargill. Even Outback has 800 which might sound like a lot, but it's not enough to impress Cargill.

We will use Uruguay beef and tell customers it's going to have more flavor and that it will be less tender and they won't eat it. We're not educators, we have to offer what consumers want. We tried Niman Ranch three times and it came off the menu each time. They are a pork wholesaler, they buy from so many suppliers that it's inconsistent as hell. In our business, we can't have that. Pappas in Houston has an advantage. They only let the beef in wrappers for 24 hours and they only have one buyer and they take it out and they inspect every cow that is slaughtered. Niman Beef always had bad muscle tissue, their sirloin was un-salable.

SFT: Any thoughts on tomorrow?

Mark: McDonalds is going to do Fair Trade coffee at 800 units, I want to know what percent of that actually gets to the farmers.

SFT: What cookbook do you recommend?

Mark: Mark Bittman's 'How to Cook Everything.' Craig Claiborne was it when I was growing up. Joy of Cooking is bad. James Peterson's books on soups, on sauces. "Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making" and "Splendid Soups: Recipes and Master Techniques for Making the World's Best Soups." I have 5800 cook books, 900 on Asian food. I buy everything. I have 90 books on Thai food. There are always new chefs interpreting things. I will pull out 20 books, formulate what I like, what are the basic flavor guidelines. I will look at a dozen recipes simultaneously.

SFT: What don't you like?

Mark: I hate white pepper. It's misplaced in European food and it doesn't add flavor. I can't stand fermented shark. Old uni is awful, and I don't like Chinese sea cucumber. I once went to Taipei and three straight courses featured sea cucumber. I was in a restaurant that was famous for sea cucumbers. It was the most disgusting meal of my life, and it was the place's specialty. The Japanese do a better job with it, they clean out the entire track better.

SFT: What food cheers you up?

Mark: I'll go to 3 Stars in Paris. In Japan I will eat seafood three times a day for an entire week. Spain though is my favorite place to go. Sicily is good too, unlike the rest of Italy, because it's full of Moroccan influences and the layering of cultures there is so much more interesting than boring old Venice. But chefs in Spain have a breadth of technique I've not seen anywhere before, and a customer base who accept adventurous cooking. The Spanish chefs are trying to enlarge their own tradition, unlike the French. El Bulli will serve 32 courses for $75, at least the first time I went there. Compare that to Per Se. Even Chez Panisse is now $78, plus 20% and plus wine. It was $9.95 when I worked there.

Ferran (Adria) is making you aware of the process of eating. He makes you question the way you experience food. That has great value! It's rooted in tradition and the Spanish care about the modern body's ability to consume a sumptuous meal.

(Heston) Blumenthal's place in (Bray) England (The Fat Duck) is good. But you have whole culture in Spain that supports experimentation. A young chef doesn't even need good reviews like he does in America or France. People in Spain go out just to try something new. Americans go out and order the exact same thing over and over. In Spain the top 30 chefs are totally different from each other. In San Francisco, they offer pretty much the same thing.

SFT: Why is that anyhow?

Mark: There is something else. There is a culture here in cities where people who own $2 million houses want to go out and eat chain food and see the same movies. The best restaurant in Phoenix failed in less than a year. I have better choice in seeing movies in Santa Fe than I do in Phoenix. I couldn't see the Truman Capote movies in Phoenix, it wasn't showing anywhere, but it was on three screens in Santa Fe, which has a hundredth the population. When I was consulting with the Marriott in Phoenix, we had an authentic SW menu and Bill Marriott walked in and changed it on the spot. He knew people wouldn't try something new.

So that comes from the top down. There are food corporations that hire organic food personalities and chefs and then won't let them order organic ingredients. There are a lot of chefs in San Francisco who just won't cook a certain dish because it's known that Michael Bauer doesn't like it. They can't take the chance because of the cost of opening a place.

Organic emphasis does not allow for cultural expression. I know of Thai restaurateurs in New York now who complain that they can't experiment with Thai cuisine because Americans won't expand their range of taste. So, it's hard to blame the big chains, they are just doing what the public demands. The blame lies with the American customer's lack of confidence in his own taste. Consumers just don't want to pay for good food in this country. The order of priorities is comfort, convenience, price and quality.

SFT: What else do I need to remember?

Mark: Fair Trade coffee is a rip-off. People are making money exploiting the idea and they are only passing a small percentage on to the farmers people think they are supporting. The people making money in the wine business are the wholesalers.

Book costs are such now that it takes 50,000 sales to break even. In Spain a chef's book is real news. If you really want to learn something, go to the San Sebastian Chef's Conference. Whole Foods is about promoting rich white lifestyles, not farmers or sustainability or anything like that. The best grocery store is the Japanese Market in Seattle, by the airport."

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