Caleb: Chef's Table - Francis Mallman

Hey boys,

I’m getting a head start on my Mac Monday duties. With the holidays, I figure there should be a little leeway in how long we have to watch and discuss this one. (Two weeks? Wait until the new year?)

I’m asking you guys to watch episode three (Francis Mallmann) of the Netflix documentary mini series, A Chef’s Table. Each episode of the show profiles an influential contemporary chef. An interest in food my bolster your enjoyment, but it’s not a prerequisite for enjoying the show, which, at it’s core, is a study of creativity. Just as music and visual art stimulate specific senses (sound and sight, respectively), cookery — particularly since Mr. Boulanger opened the world’s first restaurant in Paris in 1765 — has thrived as the imaginative stimulation of taste. Actually, come to think of it, eating is a multi-sensory experience, calling not only on taste but also on smell, touch (both “mouth feel” and tactility, the latter especially if you eat with your hands), and sight (think of the ways visual cues inform our palate).

Francis Mallmann, grew up in the wilds of Patagonia, where he still spends a portion of his year on a remote private island surrounded by a team of apprentices, and has restaurants in Buenos Aires and Uruguay. He’s considered Latin America’s preeminent chef and has won accolades the world over for his cooking, which is heavily inspired by the primitive forces—fire, in particular—of historic Andean food preparation.

I’ve chosen this episode, however, not to inspire you guys to cook over an open fire but instead because Mallmann has such a distinctive and daring life view. Socrates famously proclaimed: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Mallmann’s credo is that a life that doesn’t come into constant contact with the prospect of failure is not worth living. As he says in the show: “My life has been a path at the edge of uncertainty. Today we educate kids to be settled in a comfortable chair. You have your job; you have your little car; you have a place to sleep — and the dreams are dead. You don’t grow on a secure path. All of us should conquer something in life, and it needs a lot of work, and it needs a lot of risk.”

Enjoy.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year,
Caleb