Chef Christopher Kostow Of The Restaurant At Meadowood On Keeping It Real
Christopher Kostow is in the swing of the new season at The Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa, California, as he ties up last-minute details for the opening of his new standalone restaurant, the Charter Oak. As executive chef of the three Michelin-starred restaurants at the luxury resort, Kostow has been propagating haute cuisine based on seasonal ingredients sans technical wizardry. Doing this while within close proximity to other starred and famed establishments in the Bay Area is certainly no easy feat. A onetime philosophy student at Hamilton College, this Chicago transplant is deeply entrenched and invested in the Napa Valley that has been his playing field for the past nine years.
Although Kostow helms one of the best restaurants in the world, he has a wicked sense of humor, as illustrated by the hilarious videos posted on Instagram in response to last year's World's 50 Best Restaurants list, which included The Restaurant at Meadowood at No. 67. Such self-deprecation requires bravado but also confidence stemming from having arrived at the apex of the culinary world. Before heading to California, Kostow trained and worked in French bistros as well as Michelin-starred restaurants (including Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier). Prior to arriving at Meadowood in 2008, he had put in stints at Campton Place in San Francisco and Chez TJ in Mountain View, where he reeled in two Michelin stars for the restaurant. In 2011, the three Michelin stars were awarded in recognition of his holistic approach at Meadowood followed by the Best Chef West award from the James Beard Foundation in 2013. In 2017, he is nominated as the JBF Outstanding Chef. His 2014 book A New Napa Cuisine relates his journey and offers an insight into his work at Meadowood.
Guests at the restaurant drive through the sprawling luxury resort to arrive at the freestanding restaurant. The interior is a study in understated luxury, reminiscent of an Old World country estate. Visitors step through the massive front door into a chic lounge area with leather chairs, fireplaces, and vintage books. The wine country-chic decor belies the sophisticated food and the faultless service. The vaulted ceiling is supported by red wood columns, and granite tables in the softly lit dining room create a serene space to enjoy the tasting menu. A seat at the Chef's Counter is what food enthusiasts swear by, but the bar, with its three-course menu at a friendlier price point, is impressive as well.
Depending on the season, the Chef's Counter menu can showcase an oyster with kohlrabi, beef smoked in dry onion tops, cherry trout with a buckwheat skin, eel smoked over cabernet staves (it is wine country after all), lamb-stuffed Egyptian-style baladi, or a decadent egg yolk cooked in chicken fat with homemade Marmite and served with sourdough fingers. Finish with a chocolate-walnut-apple pastry cup or a beeswax-candle-warmed truffled crimeaux de citeaux with honeycomb, all paired with wines from the considerable wine list.
A taste of Kostow's cuisine in the elegant restaurant at the luxury resort comes with a hefty price tag. A seat at the Chef's Counter will cost $600, excluding libations and service charges. The restaurant recently adopted a pre-pay policy along with a price hike while switching to the TOCK reservation system.
When I last caught up with Kostow, he had just returned from a trip with his wife and two young daughters to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and was excited about the final stage of construction on the new restaurant. His partner in this new culinary venture is his front of house collaborator Nathaniel Dorn, while in the kitchen chef Katianna Hong will be translating the forward-thinking chef's ethos onto plates.
The Daily Meal: Is the construction of your new restaurant in Napa, the Charter Oak, nearing completion?
Christopher Kostow: The construction has been a long process as it's a very big space. The building is almost done and looking really good, and we are hoping to open the doors in May.
What is your favorite design or structural element in the new space?
I think it's the overall vastness and scale of the space with 20-foot-high ceilings. It has a beautiful courtyard with mulberry trees and red brick that give it a sense of grandeur in a Californian style. It's not the European style, which is pretty much impossible to replicate, but the old Californian sensibility. The decor is very minimal as we are trying to showcase the building with exposed red brick, blackened steel, and old wood floors.
What will be different about the food or service as opposed to The Restaurant at Meadowood?
It's going to be all family-style and hyper-casual, and most things will be served off a large hearth in the middle of the room. The space is very big, so it will lend itself to a self-exploratory experience for guests. It's also an opportunity for us to support a young chef. Kat has been with me for five years, and she is going to do a really good job there.
Is there something that will surprise guests?
I think the absence of service will surprise guests as it will be a very hands-off approach to dining. There will be no wait staff fawning over tables, and there will be white coats but only running the food. It will all feel very natural.
We spoke once about white tablecloth dining for your next project. Is it not this one?
No [laughing]. Definitely not since it is the opposite.
Are cutlery drawers at tables a part of this hands-off approach?
Yes, there are cutlery drawers at tables.
What kind of guests do you envision at Charter Oak as opposed to Meadowood, which is a resort setting?
The clientele will run the gamut of guests looking for great dining and sophistication. We will probably have people from every walk of life and place. It is what drove this concept of simplicity. I feel that people who know a lot about food will appreciate the beautiful simplicity. People who don't, on the other hand, can still appreciate it as it will be understandable. It was very important for us that we were able to appeal to a vast majority or a wide swath of people who come to visit Napa Valley. From socioeconomic and food points of view, we will have a little bit of everything.
I am assuming that the price point will be quite different from Meadowood.
Yes, it will be very affordable and approachable even though Napa Valley is a little bit more elevated in price point than other places. Charter Oak will be very comparable and competitive to other casual restaurants in the area.
The Instagram videos you posted last year about placing No. 67 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list were hilarious. What were they about?
We don't want to come across as bitter or angry but we believe very strongly in the work we do. To be told that we were No. 67 in anything was to us a bit funny and irritating at the same time. Lists like OAD, which I think is ridiculous [and] where we are rated No. 6 for example, the guy doesn't know my name and has never even been here. As for the voting for lists like San Pellegrino are they saying that so many people went to Lima? No way! Or to Moscow, no way, so you can question many of these rating processes. On OAD, we are very well considered on the list but every year they call me Craig Kostow and talk about dishes we had 10 years ago on the menu. For the 10 years that we have been open he has never visited, so how does he decide this list? The problem is that chefs grant validity to these events by appearing there or by participating.
Is that the reason some chefs don't even show up at the 50 Best awards?
I don't think I would show up. It's all very self-congratulatory, and whether you are No. 3 or No. 103 on the list, it doesn't matter. The idea that we all get in a room, pat each other on the back! It's crazy. We are just chefs; we aren't curing cancer or anything. Chefs who are smarter than me do take advantage of the business these lists bring in, and they make very specific campaigns to be on these lists.
What bothers me is that the rest of the journalistic world is all about the headline that reads World's Best Chef cooking a dinner. It isn't just like adopting a phrase that someone verbalized like World's Best Restaurant chef doing a pop-up for example. So, are they saying it is the World's Best? Have they even been there? No, it's just what the list says.
Doesn't that stem from the fact that most people writing these stories don't have knowledge or understanding of the chefs or their work?
That is true because they don't understand the chef or the work they are doing, they haven't experienced the cuisine, don't understand the differences between chefs, and simply put, they have no context. It's like me becoming an opera reviewer. What do I know about opera? Nothing, and I can go to one and say yeah, sure it was great.
How significant is the role of food critics these days since social media has enabled anyone to be a critic? Do they still influence public opinion?
We are in a fortunate position right now, and it may not last forever [but] we don't really worry when a journalist comes in for dinner. We ourselves have such high expectations, which are way higher than anyone else would have from us. So the idea that we are going to be worried when someone walks in the door doesn't apply. If we are worried then that means that we are not doing our jobs well. We need to please ourselves and work up to our own standards and expectations first.
Granted that we have a greater degree of knowledge in order to make these experiences vis a vis are we doing a good job or not according to someone else. It is scary to be granting the power to opinionated knuckleheads to judge us. Sure, they have the power to and do change opinions. I feel there is a muddying of waters by Michelin or the Pellegrino-sponsored list and now what seems like a million other lists. The average consumer on Facebook doesn't know the difference; they don't know which one was anonymous, which one was paid for. Everyday there is a list that taps the top 10 restaurants of Napa or Tulsa or someplace else and eventually the diners cannot differentiate after being bombarded repeatedly with this information.
Do the chefs help popularize these lists, or is it the other way around?
Some very well-known chefs were around at the inception of this stuff, and chefs give these lists validity. If the chefs didn't show up for the awards or didn't put it out on their Twitter feed, then they wouldn't enable this process. No doubt it benefits us, and having three Michelin stars has provided consistent business to The Restaurant.
Are the three Michelin stars more validating than all of these lists?
I feel all of it has value relatively since this business is about attracting guests and talent to your team. It's nice to get the three stars, but at the end of the day I don't think much about any of this. It's not what drives the team.
Does that realization come in a later stage of your career?
That is true, because by then you have put more into it, and so then the idea that someone else is going to tell you if it's worth it or not seems silly after all these years. If your whole career or credibility is based on some guide or list, that seems like an uneven exchange of your energies and emotions.
Is fine dining an elitist concept in the US?
People here in the US don't think much about paying $1,000 for a television but will not be so willing to pay that for a meal. It's really a question about our value system. In Europe people don't readily buy huge expensive cars like they do here. If it is elitist, it's certainly expensive but that doesn't make it elitist. It all depends on how you execute your products and how you interface with your guests, with your community, and the media. That can make it elitist because it can be perceived that way. The price is the price as any other chef in the same situation [with three stars] will tell you and regardless we are all busy. So it isn't that we have to justify what we charge our consumers.
Do you feel media raises people's expectations inordinately?
If we are going to charge $400 for dinner, we better make it exceptional irrespective of anything. So I think people should come in with incredibly high expectations, but having said that, there also seems to be a meeting halfway between the guest and the restaurant. Some people come in and want the Alinea effect with smoke and mirrors. Others want more French-style, lobster poached in butter, and so some people do come in with all these preconceived ideas instead of going in with an open mind. If people do that and meet the restaurant halfway and we are executing correctly on our end, then the experience is worth every penny for sure.
While preparing the menu for the season or choosing products, what do you want your diners to experience? Is the visual effect or the flavor first?
The possibility of elegance and luxury in otherwise simple things is what we want them to experience. It might be a risotto made with the seeds of a cucumber, for example, or a single potato pulled out of the ground. Things of that sort are most interesting for me to present. It puts the onus on us as you have to make sure that it's really well done, otherwise you are serving a mediocre potato for $100 per person. That is not honest cooking according to me.
We have a vision of the art of wabi-sabi, or the [Japanese] art of the imperfect, like serving things out of the ground as they are. But we are really cooking and not putting a potato on a plate, but without overmanipulating it. We think we cannot make it better than nature made it, but our job is just to showcase those things that we grow ourselves in the best way possible. To grow these products, we are selective in what we are choosing to plant and how we are growing them and what is the ideal time to harvest. Our goal is to make everything pure.
Sometimes if you travel to a city like San Francisco and dine out every night then very often it seems like you are eating the same food, though it may be plated differently. Why is that?
If you go to Tokyo during Ayu fish season you will find every restaurant serving it. It's the same when you go to Lyon in France, when a certain product is in season. There is something to be said about regionality in cooking, of course, but on the other hand there are trends encouraged by Instagram or social media in general. It's very easy for people to appropriate what you are doing. Restaurants like ours are sort of incubators for these ideas that trickle down and eventually become part of the industry. That is true of every creative field like arts, architecture, or fashion where ideas filter down.
Is American gastronomy going to be affected by the win at Bocuse d'Or this year?
It's great that they won, but Bocuse d'Or is not my cup of tea, and I don't see the relevance of that to the state of restaurants in the country. Chefs like Thomas Keller and Daniel Boloud are certainly trying to work on that.
Is it because it is adapting the French culture to ours?
It seems like you are playing someone else's sport, for sure. I don't care if we are bad at it, like soccer, because we are bad at other sports like cricket too. I don't think it's a reflection of where the food movement is going. I go to Paris, and I feel Paris is ripping off Brooklyn. Brooklyn more or less ripped off Portland, and what is happening in Paris did not start in Paris. These are inherently American-style restaurants.
What are the problems in the food industry that are not vocalized by restaurateurs and chefs in public?
Just because of all the attention focused on chefs and restaurants, we cannot forget the economics of this business. That is totally lost on everyone who says, "Oh, cooks should make more money" or "There should be more paid leave in restaurants." In that case you are trying to normalize an industry that is inherently not normal and has razor-thin margins. Just because it's popular or glamorized now it doesn't make it any different from 50 years ago.
With the wage hikes are there eventually going to be fewer employment opportunities in the business?
It's probably true and it will lead to more automation. Look at the advent of new ovens, where you can push a button and cook a chicken. There is a lot more of that happening, and I feel there will also be less technical cooking since it requires more man-hours. No doubt about it.
Are white tablecloth restaurants disappearing? Even you have bare tables in your restaurant.
A lot of that is a reflection of aesthetics and the other is labor. It costs money to do that. I still like them even though we took ours off a few years ago. It's also about the guests' expectations. I don't think guests these days expect that or equate what they are paying with cloths on the table. I don't think many three-star restaurants in the Bay Area have them anymore. I would go back to it if I did something high-end but in a different way.
Do you think the days of so-called "molecular cuisine" over?
I understand what people mean by molecular cooking, but all cooking is essentially molecular. If I make gelatin or pasta, it's all about understanding how chemicals react. The sort of overt presentation such as here's a sphere of this or that is not seen much anymore. At least in three-star restaurants, no one seems to be doing a lot of that. It should probably disappear as it's never going to be as good as a perfectly cooked potato for example. I have no desire to eat that food myself.
Are the young culinary school grads well-grounded in the basics of cooking?
I was recently at the culinary school in Hyde Park, New York, and it is a pretty impressive curriculum. I didn't go to culinary school, and I was really impressed by the depth of the education they provide. However at the end of the day, cooking is about repetition and doing something a million times until you perfect it. So you are not going to come out of there knowing what you are doing, but some of these schools are providing a good training.
You didn't attend a culinary school, so do you think it is necessary, or are you better off exploring your own creativity?
No matter, what you do need to know is how to do basic cooking. Creativity is not enough and the worst thing is when chefs are creative without knowing the basics of cooking. That results in bad food, and incidentally, a lot of cooks who are self-taught trained themselves how to cook by studying. I spent a lot of time with chefs like Thomas Keller or Charlie Trotter who didn't go to culinary school, but they really studied on their own.
Do guests' expectations rise in correlation to your stars and fame? How do you rise up to meet those expectations?
There has to be a relentlessness about the whole thing. The whole team has to always be trying to get better. Just having your eyes open and being in the restaurant is important. For us, we're redoing our plate program and expanding the garden, adding orchards or animals to raise so we can get better. The menu development, for one, never stops in our kitchen. Even on the day we are closed, I am in here all day working on stuff and we have been doing that for almost 10 years now. That is the reason why I don't worry about what anyone has to say because we are pushing ourselves incredibly hard.
Chefs' egos rise in proportion to their celebrity or reknown, and it seems more prevalent in the U.S. Why?
It's not just more American chefs, but chefs in general are egoistical. By nature, chefs are more insecure and ego-driven people. You are in a business where you work super hard to get noticed and be appreciated. The kind of people who gravitate toward that are those that look for instant gratification and for whom the opinions of others are very important. Top Chef stuff is huge even in France from what I have seen. That is across borders, and in the US, there is lower tolerance for some of the foolery that exists, certainly in the French kitchens.
You have your own gardens and you use what you grow in the restaurant. Why are so many restaurants maintaining their own gardens these days?
At first, it's about competition between chefs. When you see chefs who are growing beautiful things, others want to do that too. There are some social elements to it but at the end of the day these chefs are spending the money in pursuit of making their restaurant better. It is a monstrous undertaking to grow your own products. If it's a trend, it's not going to last long because it requires incredible commitment, financial resources, and professional expertise. We have a team of six people and allocate a large budget to the garden because it is central to everything we do.
Which young chefs in the US are ones to watch?
I don't want to give names, but I would argue that there are a lot of chefs in small markets, small cities, or out in the country who are doing better food than what you find in big cities. A lot of them don't get the attention they deserve. There [are] a lot of interesting, dynamic [chefs] in America, more than France or a lot of the other countries. Spain has a long history of cuisine, but a lot of the modern Spanish cooking is predicated around where you are cooking and it's not my thing.
You have two young children. In this rapidly evolving culture, what would you like to preserve for them?
Open spaces, for one. Napa is very beautiful, but it's all privately owned now.
What would you like to bring back to the food culture? For the story to go on for the next generation?
Locally I feel, as I said in my book, it's about a certain mindfulness of what's happening around you. Whatever results from that mindfulness is up to an individual or chef. As long as you understand the history of a place, support local people, and help them pursue their own agricultural endeavor and bring along local artisans. The result will all be different for each individual. What is happening in Napa is that there is a very homogenous planned vanilla development because people don't dig deep into what's happening around them.
Is this a cultural effect?
I think economics plays a very huge role in this. If you are catering to wealthy tourists, that impacts the food and if the cost of doing business is high, then you won't have young entrepreneurial chefs opening small progressive restaurants. It's the economics in all the markets that drives the food culture.
What was your experience at Osteria Franscescana during the Gelinaz chef shuffle?
The whole experience was really fun and really enjoyable. The concept of popping up, above all, is all about opening doors to interesting collaborative processes. From an interpersonal relationship point of view, it is really interesting to meet all these people. Restaurants can be very insular places, where we are all are super-focused on work and pursuing our own stories. It is interesting to pop up in someone's kitchen across the world and meet all the people involved. It was my first visit, and it was great spending time in Modena with Massimo; his wife, Lara; son, Charlie; and the team.
You also participated in the Gelinaz event in San Francisco last year. What is your opinion of such events?
I normally don't do a lot of these events, but I did enjoy it. As a concept, it very different as there are a lot of events but the one in Modena was especially interesting. You experience your peers' culinary work and culture in their own environment.
Last year you took a break from your "Twelve Days of Christmas" event. Is it back on for 2017?
Yes, we just took a year off, and we are holding it again this year with a very insane lineup of guest chefs. It's going to be very interesting is all I can say until we officially announce the event. We enjoy having our friends come and cook with us. It's great for the team and the community who get exposed to these different chefs. It's been a great event for us and we are looking forward to the next one.
So, who is on this year?
[laughing] I am not disclosing that right now, but stay tuned for the news!