Dining Disasters, Crazy Chefs, and a Michelin-Starred Nightmare: True Restaurant Stories

Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio

Milk Street Radio

Food, Arts

4.4 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we share stories from the world of fine dining. Maître d' Michael Cecchi-Azzolina has encounters with mobsters, fainting celebrities and unruly guests at New York’s top restaurants and reveals the secrets to great service. Writer Geraldine DeRuiter sits down for the world’s strangest Michelin-starred meal: She eats rancid cheese, slurps foam out of a ceramic mouth and is forced to watch the kitchen staff play extreme sports. Plus, historian Rebecca Spang uncovers the invention of the restaurant, Sara Moulton reveals the most baffling thing she ever witnessed in her career as a chef, and actors tell us how waiting tables unexpectedly helped their theater careers.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Christopher Kimble. You know, many folks have asked if they could travel to the same places we do while visiting the same cooks, the same restaurants, the same markets. Well, now you can.
0:11.0	Starting next year, Milk Street will be offering culinary tours in partnership with culinary backstreet. We're going to Oaxaca, to Athens, to Istanbul, and Mexico City.
0:21.0	And you'll get to meet and learn from many of the same people who have changed the way I cook. Along with a very small group of fellow travelers, you'll visit our favorite bars, restaurants, and street food stalls.
0:31.0	You'll step into the kitchen at hands-on cooking classes with some of our favorite teachers. And you'll meet farmers and artisans who are way off the beaten path.
0:40.0	So if you want to change the way you travel in cook, you might want to check this out. Trips are capped at just 12 guests, so please reserve now. Learn more at 177milkstreet.com slash tours.
0:57.0	This is Milk Street Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimble.
1:02.0	A mature D makes enemies with the wrong person at his bar.
1:06.0	Turns out the guy that I try to cut off was part of the Goddie crime family. And he when no uncertain terms came up to me and said, I don't know who you are, but you disrespected me. And I want to take care of you for that.
1:21.0	A diner finds herself licking foam out of a ceramic mouth.
1:26.0	And it was put down and they said, this is the chef's kiss.
1:29.0	And that chef publishes a manifesto on fine dining, which inexplicably has three pictures of men on horses.
1:37.0	That's coming up later in the hour, along with more tales of the ridiculous, surprising, and secret things that happen in restaurants.
1:44.0	So to start the show, let's go back to the beginning to the birth of dining as we know it.
1:49.0	Right now I'm joined by Rebecca Spang, a professor of history at Indiana University. Her book is the invention of the restaurant.
1:57.0	Rebecca, welcome to Milk Street.
1:59.0	Thank you for having me.
2:01.0	So the story we've all been told about restaurants in Paris is the revolution, you know, 1789.
2:11.0	There are all these chefs who worked at Versailles or worked at some of these great houses.
2:17.0	They had nowhere to go, so they decided to open restaurants.
2:21.0	And that was the birth of the French restaurant.
2:23.0	You say otherwise, that that's actually not a true story.
2:28.0	I do say otherwise when I started to do the research for my book, The Invention of the Restaurant.
	...

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