Chef Nick Balla of Bar Tartine talks about the restaurant's incredible DIY food program and how he's influenced by Japanese and Hungarian cuisines.
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It's difficult with this place to be able to communicate
exactly what we do here. We don't really have a
culture, we kind of focus on Central Europe, and there's
some Asian influence. But really, the menu makes sense because
it's all processed here from local ingredients. Versus being from
a particular place in the world. [MUSIC] I'm Nick Molla
I cook at Bar Tartine. [BLANK_AUDIO] I started cooking when
I was in middle school I suppose, would always have
friends over and I'd be the one throwing together like
30-ingredient pasta or something. We were in high school and
had a band we wanted to Be rockstars but pay
the bills, I wash wishing dishes and then ended up
flying cooking soon after sue chef. It just clicked. When
I think it was one afternoon, I don't know, I
was like, yeah I'm excited about this. I think I
should, I guess I'll go to culinary school. My mom's
gonna be happy I'm doing something. [MUSIC] Japanese cooking became
a deep curiosity for me when I was in culinary
school because it's such a unique approach to cooking. It
really focuses flavors in an intense way. I think it's
some of the most intensely flavored food of any cuisine.
[MUSIC] I ended up traveling there a number of times
[UNKNOWN] at a restaurant. And also started working in a
fish cake factory, and worked for a day doing [UNKNOWN]
noodles and taco matsu. I finished culinary school in New
York and decided to move to the Bay area because
I was curious about the West Coast. I'd never really
spent a lot of time here. I was given the
opportunity to open my first restaurant, to have my first
chef job at this Japanese place, [UNKNOWN] Lounge at the
Hotel Kabuki I was an untested chef and really never
run a Japanese restaurant either. So it was a big
gamble. It went over great, we got good reviews. But
I really knew in my heart that I wanted to
go work in neighborhood restaurants. So I got together with
a couple of partners and we opened [UNKNOWN] [MUSIC] I
met Chad Robertson he would come in for dinner a
few times a week. [MUSIC] And we would talk about
food and ideas had said what are come take over
Bar Tarteen. I had, in fact, at the time had
planned to go and try and open a Central European
restaurant, which I had been wanting to do that to
explore more of my roots. I have Hungarian roots as
well as about seven other things. But that's the one
that I connect the most to. [MUSIC] My father was
curious about going back and exploring that side of our
family, and our heritage. And so he moved to Budapest
in 1988. I ended up moving there with him while
I was in high school which was the early 90s.
We lived with a Hungarian family. They would butcher a
pig every few weeks and the grandmother would bring us
fresh sausage a couple hours later. We really got to
connect to real good quality Hungarian peasant food. [MUSIC] It
was terrifying taking over at Bar Tarteen. It was already
a Beloved restaurant that was serving food that people liked
and wanted. And to come in and make this whatever
it is that we make was a big risk. [SOUND]
When I came on board, Chris Kroner had just left
and he still makes these incredible burgers and that was
on the menu. We replaced the burger with goulash, with
bone marrow toast [LAUGH]. Threw some people off, but at
the end of the day the restaurant's doing really well.
We're really busy, and I think that people really get
it and really appreciate it. [SOUND] [MUSIC] Large percentage of
the menu is vegetable focused. It doesnt make any sense
to have a meat heavy menu when we have this
incredible bounty here We like sour, we like spice, we
like bitter, we like a lot of strong forward flavor
that up until recently really want acceptable in this kind
of echelon of restaurant. [MUSIC] No wonder we're creating a
lot of dishes that might seem more Central European. They
always have some element of Japanese cooking. [MUSIC] We started
trying to interpret dishes like Hungarian Goulash and realized that
starting with the base of Kombu Dashi would only add
flavor to the stock in the ends. So, we would
start you know, simmering the beef with Kombu Dashi. That
doesn't taste. Necessarily overly Japanese, or you don't feel like
you're in a Japanese restaurant. But there's a subtle flavor
that you're trying to recognize and it really makes sense.
[MUSIC] I've always wanted to try to make whatever I
could in-house. There's no real specific reason why. I think
some of it must come from my mother. She's a
bit of a hippie and a lot of the food
that we had growing up was raised locally. She was
a gardener. She had an incredible garden. We didn't have
a lot of packaged foods. [NOISE] I've been playing around
with processing things in various restaurants for years but working
with Courtney here has really made it possible to take
it to the extent that we have here. Courtney and
I started dating right when I took over at Bar
Tartine and never planned to work together [BLANK_AUDIO] There was
one day I believe when we had received a whole
goat and hundreds of pounds of vegetables to process, and
it was completely impossible. So, she came in to butcher
the goat and never left. [NOISE] She was already processing
a lot of things herself before we met. She was
way into this stuff. So she's really talented and incredible
with what she does. These things would never be possible
without her here. [BLANK_AUDIO] When possible we try to make
everything we can here in house. We make a lot
of things. We make, give me one second to think
about it. [LAUGH] [MUSIC] There's a large dairy program. We
make dairy kefir, which is a cultured milk product. We
make buttermilk and cultured butter We make yogurt. We make
sour cream. [MUSIC] Fresh cheeses. There's long-aged cheeses, blues, pepper
jacks, feta, halloumi, and then, even a fermented thousand oak
cheese called Two Dollar Hungarian. In a specialty. [MUSIC] For
cured meat items, we get into cured salamis and hams,
cured lardo or pork fat, dried beef. We make bottarga
from mullet roe that we get from my uncle in
Florida. [MUSIC] As far as pickles go, we've done hundreds
of different things. Constantly working to make our own capers
out of a lot of green seeds and buds. We'll
brine ferment all kinds of pickles. Do kind of Jewish
deli style pickles. So we'll have green tomatoes, cucumbers, sometimes
apples, all kinds of different pickles. [MUSIC] We make a
lot of our spices in-house. [MUSIC] We dry peppers for
paprika powder, green and red. We smoke peppers for chipotles.
We make onion powder, garlic powder. We make our incredible
[UNKNOWN] paste every year, by pureeing basically hundreds and hundreds
of pounds of fresh peppers and letting them ferment and
drying them out. Great paste to spread on bread. [MUSIC]
We make vinegars. There will be citrus vinegars, cider vinegars
from pear, from apple, quince vinegar. We make some traditional
Japanese items. Koji, which is kind of the base of
Japanese cooking. In the summer we'll get flageolet beans, or
lima beans, and make meso out of it. We try
to make all the non-alcoholic beverages in-house. [MUSIC] We dry
a lot of flowers for our tea program. [MUSIC] There's
a sparkling water keeper that's on draft. It's really tasty.
We're constantly getting Fruit when it's season, and making syrups
for our soda bases. [MUSIC] There's really no limit. We'll
try to make as many products as we possibly can.
[MUSIC] Some people think we're crazy for doing it. Maybe
a little bit but I think a lot of it
just kind of makes sense with the food. At the
end of the day, the flavors can be better, so.
I just don't think we can go back and do
it any other way, now. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]