Shea Gallante of Cru in New York Interview

I grew up in the country, again,

on the freshest ingredients.

We'd get sweet corn right from,

we'd pick it off and go home and cook it.

Tomatoes and all organically or, just not organic,

but homegrown stuff out in Dutchess County.

Things of which I didn't care about that stuff then.

I wanted to eat McDonald's,

I wanted pizza, I wanted kinda whatever

a young kid wanted to eat.

I didn't want to eat a perfect tomato

or roasted zucchini.

Something about

Italian cuisine

just like completely enthralls me.

It's just like

while there's great foods of the world,

Italian cuisine definitely is closest to my heart

gastronomically speaking.

The ingredients, flavor combinations,

reasons why things are together

and why things are what they are

and just kinda the whole logic and thought

behind Italian food.

That it is such a ingredient based cuisine.

It's not so technical that it's very classical,

very traditional, very domestic almost

in Italy.

Everything's derived around the optimal ingredient,

the most pristine product that you can possibly get.

The part that I don't like as much

as the ingredient aspect of it is,

they'll take a pristine ingredient

and then they'll braise it.

They'll take beautiful green beans

and make like potatoes and green bean salad.

Potatoes cooked down with green beans

folded in fagiolini and patate.

But what happens?

The beans turn brown

and it changes the whole flavor profile of it

and it's not the same.

If you take a brown bean and a green bean

perfectly blanched next to each other and you eat them,

you know there's a huge difference.

For me, that was the only downside to Italian cooking

was kinda like, you cooked it and you cooked it

and you cooked it and you manipulated the flavor,

I didn't think in a positive way in some aspects.

You can learn how to make stuff in a year,

but it's the second year when you learn

why it's made and why everything is.

To learn to do it takes one year and no problem,

but in the end, if you don't know why

all those things are made or why they're put together,

why they are what they are,

it doesn't matter what you can make

if you don't know why they're made.

That's the most important question

that needs to be answered.

I could show you how to saute a piece of fish.

If you don't know why it's cooking the way it is

or why we're doing certain things,

you could take a piece of fish and it wouldn't be the same.

You just make sure you got a brown crust, you flip it.

You wouldn't understand density

of certain different proteins versus others,

flaky fish versus

more of a denser, firm fish.

You would just cook it, see it brown,

cook it the other side.

You wouldn't think about the heat passing

through the middle of the fish,

understanding that had to be cooked

to a certain temperature internally.

And how you wanna get that heat from end to end

at the most consistently

delicate rate as possible.

You would just think you just gotta cook it, saute it,

throw it on a plate, and then someone's cutting

into a piece of raw fish in the middle.

The understanding of why is what helps people

to be good cooks.

Food knowledge has increased tremendously

amongst the dining public,

which puts more stress, pressure,

drive for us from our end

to keep delivering something fresh,

something new, something exciting.

I think a lot of that is what has pushed it

into this kinda

new wave of avant-garde cooking.

You have to find

new avenues, new ideas,

new interpretations.

Brown vegetables.

Just giant pet peeve.