Chef Joanne Chang left a job as a management consultant to become a chef – and it’s lucky for food lovers that she did. Her legendary (Bobby-Flay-beating) sticky buns sell out at all four Flour locations and Myers + Chang is pretty much perpetually packed. On this week’s Top Chef Chang finds herself at the table with culinary legend, Jacques Pepin, to pay tribute to another culinary legend who called Cambridge home, Julia Child. We caught up with her and talked about her experience and why we’re not likely to catch her competing on any Top Chef-ish shows any time soon.
Boston Chefs: You’ve done culinary competitions yourself before, yes?
Chang: Throwdown with Bobby Flay is really the only one and that was a competition but it was a surprise so it’s not like I prepped for it or anything. I thought I was doing something else and then Bobby Flay showed up and challenged me and then it was over like within a couple hours. But I’ve never done anything like this where there’s an on-going competition.
BC: Does it feel at all uncomfortable judging the dishes or the chefs knowing that they had to do it under time constraints or with limited ingredients?
Chang: Yeah. I was so impressed with what they were able to do given the limitations on time and space and ingredients. I don’t know specifically what restrictions they had for the dinner they cooked for us but it is hard knowing that they’ve put so much into it. They’re away for two or three months from family and friends and I know it’s very intense. And they obviously are all really talented and they all care a lot and they’re all doing their best. It’s always hard to be in those situations where you see people who are doing everything they can and yet sometimes things happen and something doesn’t come out exactly as you intended. Y’know we go through this every day at the bakery and every night during service at the restaurant. You know what you want to come out on the plate and hopefully you get that most of the time but every now and then something comes out on the plate and it’s just not what you wanted. At the restaurant we have the luxury of being able to say “Nope. I’m sending it back. Refire this.” But on something like Top Chef there are deadlines so when time’s up they just have to give it to the judges.
BC: So what are you looking for in a successful plate?
Chang: I mean pretty much like a normal going out to dinner. I mean, what are the things that strike you. Does it look nice? Does it look appealing? Is it well prepared? Is it tasty? Do the flavor combinations work? Are the textural combinations interesting? Just kind of judging the dish as a whole? Did you enjoy it? Was it a nice tribute to Julia? ‘Cause nobody did anything straight from a Julia book. The challenge wasn’t to see if they could read a recipe and follow it because at this point none of these chefs needs to be tested on that but how did they interpret recipes that Julia has done and how did they bring themselves into that. So judging was just based on how successful the chefs were in being able to do that.
BC: That sounds like so much fun.
Chang: It was. I was pinching myself. This is really amazing that I can just sit here and have these chefs cook for me. And then listen to all my peers talk about it; that was really amazing.
BC: What does it tell you about a chef that they’ve had success in this kind of forum?
Chang: One of the things that I’ve found in my kitchen experience is that anybody can cook anything, given enough time and space and ingredients. And the challenge every day is limited time, limited space and maybe not all of the ingredients that you’d like at that moment. And so what can you do with what you’re given? And obviously in a restaurant, we try every day to give ourselves as much time as we can, the best ingredients we can and create our spaces so they’re as efficient as possible. But the reality is that at 5:30 every day the doors open and you just don’t know what’s going to happen so I feel like being able to compete in a show like this shows your ability to be flexible, quick-thinking, decisive and creative depending on whatever situation is being thrown at you. A big part of it just being like “Ok. I’m not going to freak out. Whatever comes my way, y’know, I know how to do this. I know how to cook and I know what these ingredients are even though I may not have put them together in this way or cooked in a kitchen that looks like this but I know how to make something happen.” So confidence is another one of the things that it shows that they have.
BC: If you were designing a Top Chef Boston challenge what would it be?
Chang: I find the idea of these timed challenges with limited space and everything – I mean, my heart is pounding just thinking about it. I would give them lots of time, lots of space and lots of ingredients and say “Go make something that tastes really delicious.” And just let them do what they do and have the luxury of really being able to put their all into everything. I get nervous just thinking about their doing it. I think it’s one of the reasons I don’t watch the show. It makes me so nervous. I get so anxious. I can’t even imagine being put in those scenarios. So I don’t know that I’d even have a good one. I can’t come up with something…I would just feel so bad being like “Do this. In this timeframe. With this ingredient. That you’ve never seen before.” I couldn’t do it.
BC: Your dessert prowess is well-known around these parts, did you get to eat a dessert prepared by the cheftestants?
Chang: No, actually. For me it was interesting to be part of the judging panel in that I don’t have a lot of savory cooking experience beyond what we do at Myers + Chang which is specific to that restaurant and Chinese food. I don’t have the background to be able to judge if something is braised properly. I came at it much more from just a regular diner’s point of view. I like to eat. I like to eat lots of things and so I just enjoyed the dishes that were brought to me but they didn’t do anything pastry-wise when I was there.
BC: What makes Boston a good location for a season of Top Chef? Or why is now the time for Boston to host?
Chang: Did you read recently the piece Gordon Hamersley wrote for the Boston Globe Magazine? He wrote a nice thing about his time in Boston about opening a restaurant twenty-five or thirty years ago. It was so fascinating to read about how there were really only a few restaurants that people went to and he’s seen the dining scene change so much. The restaurant community that we have now is so vibrant and really, really talented. You can go to any neighborhood and there’s a bunch of great restaurants to go to and chefs that are doing awesome things and people who are just really into making great restaurant experiences. And reading what Gordon wrote – that wasn’t always the case. We have such a passionate community of food people both working in the food industry as well as experiencing it from the guest perspective. And it seems to me that for a show like Top Chef you definitely need that base in a host city – to have a city that interested and interesting in terms of food and people and restaurants. We’re old and historic and yet we also have more colleges per square mile than any other place or something like that. Putting those two things together – the history and then all the new young people really makes for such a great city which I’d imagine is one of the things that would make for a great Top Chef city – sort of the old and the new.
