Florence - Tyler Florence Family Meal: Bringing People Together Never Tasted Better

Stirring the Pot

Dinner at MyPlace

Tylers Ultimate

Eat This Book

Tyler Florences Real Kitchen

T oday, there is no single way to define a family. In the simplest terms, its the people you spend a great deal of time with, care for deeply, and trust with everything. A two-way, never-ending street of giving and sharing with green lights in both directions.

Im dedicating this book to two people who have lived incredible lives and who define our family, two people that my wife, Tolan, and I cant thank enough: her parents, Marge and Larry.

Tireless grandparents, best friends, drinking companions, mediators, confidants, consiglieres, and allies, they welcomed me into their family six years ago and havent looked back. Thank you for sharing your lives with us, and thank you for making each family meal special.

T.F.

When you hear the words family meal, no doubt you have immediate associations: a big pot of Sunday-night sauce with pasta; your grandmothers pot roast; a perfectly roasted chicken with pan gravy and mashed potatoes. Mention these words to a chef, though, and you evoke something else entirely. To those of you whove never worked in restaurants, family meal is the shared meal that is served to the entire restaurant staff before service starts each day. It is a restaurant ritual and a great source of pride among the up-and-coming cooks on the staffnot to mention a great way to air any dirty laundry, discuss the specials of the night, and (perhaps most important), keep theft down.

At my very first restaurant job, I often collaborated on family meal with a fellow dishwasher, a Polish migr and former circus worker. The dinners we turned out were a hybrid of southern dishes and traditional Polish food: fried pork chops, for example, were turned into golonka, a classical Polish stew of pork knuckles cooked with caraway, cabbage, and whatever other vegetables we had in-house and mashed potatoes left over from the previous night were transformed into pierogis. Ultimately my coworkers demons got the best of him after a year-long tenure at the dish station, but Ill always remember him and how we tackled family meal together and how those meals helped me share a bit of who I was with the people in my work family through the food I made for them.

Since then there have been a lot of family meals under the bridge, and my family, both personal and professional, has expanded exponentially. The last fifteen years of my life are a collection of memories of kitchens, restaurants, and cooking with different chefs, in different countries and different cities.

From culinary and business schools at Johnson and Wales University in Charleston, South Carolina, to moving to New York City to work at Aureole with Charlie Palmer and his refined New American Cuisine, then on to Pino Luon-gos Mad. 61 to learn classic Tuscan Italian; from line cook at the beautiful three-star River Caf in Brooklyn (back in its heyday) to becoming the executive chef at Cibo by the time I was twenty-fiveIve lived more life in the kitchen than outside it. Food defines me.

Ive also had the opportunity to go around the world several times, mostly thanks to my family at Food Network. Weve shot amazing programming in off-the-beaten-track locations that a restaurant-bound chef living in New York City would never have the chance to experience. Ive been truffle hunting in Alba; and Ive made prosciutto in Parma, pizza in Naples, fish and chips in London, bouillabaisse in Marseilles, dim sum in Hong Kong, mole in Oaxaca, jambalaya in New Orleans, fried chicken in Mississippi, and tapas in Barcelona. For a chef, it just doesnt get much better.

And in a way, everything Ive done in my life has been a dress rehearsal for whats happening right now. Marin County, just north of San Francisco, is where Im putting my roots down, raising my family, and starting multiple business ventures. My wife, Tolan, and I have a lot on our plate with three restaurants; three kitchen stores; our new wines with the Michael Mondavi Family; Sprout, our organic baby-food company; our cutlery, cookware, spice, and sauce lines; and, of course, more television and booksall while raising three children. We call it the Florence Family Circus.

With all of these projects on the table and more in the pipeline, Ive got to tell you, Ive never been happier. I love my beautiful wife; my children, Miles, Hayden, and Dorothy; and all of the new members of my extended family, which grows with each new venture. It is this burgeoning extended family that brought me to the title of this book, Family Meal. With each project I take on, I gain a new group of people to work with who inspire me and who, as my associates, ultimately become part of my family. And to this day, whenever I find a new group of people ready to share their lives with me, my first instinct is to cook for them.

To me, the concept of Family Meal has transcended the restaurant kitchen to represent the way I interact with my friends, my family, my neighbors, my business partners, my employeesand now, you. If you are a part of my life, I want to tell you about who I am through my food. Kitchens are all I know, food is all I think about, and when I cook for the people around me it shows you that I care just as it does when you cook for the people in your own family, however it is configured.

For me, thats what it truly means to cook, whether Im creating the menus for my restaurants or making pancakes in the kitchen with my middle child, Hayden. Over the past thirty-nine years, Ive learned from and been influenced by an amazing group of colleagues, family members, and good friends; now its my turn to share not just the recipes and techniques Ive accumulated, but also what it means to cook a dish for someone else and put everything thats in your soul into that plate of food. I finally feel that I have learned enough that I can start teaching the next generation. I want to teach my children the emotion behind the act of providing. Its not the crispiness of my fried chicken that makes cooking my calling, or the creaminess of my potato puree that makes me feel good about myself. Its my ability to express my emotions and communicate my feelings through these dishes that is truly rewarding to me. And this kind of satisfaction doesnt come in a vacuum. It works just like a telephone: There has to be a person on each end of the line for the circuit to be complete. My cooking and my food arent worth a lick if theres nobody there for me to share them with.