Fathers and Sons

I'm rewatching the documentary Step Up to the Plate on Netflix.  It's about a father and son, Michel and Sebastien Bras.  Michel's passing on his namesake restaurant to Sebastien and planning on retiring. Oddly enough, it's somewhat familiar territory for my pilot about a family of chefs in San Francisco.  Watching this complicated relationship between father and son is riveting to me,  mainly because I lived my own complicated relationship with my father growing up.  And looking back at it, it was somewhat competitive.  Not in a conscious way.  But Dad and I were competing because he knew that I had more of a capacity for greatness than he did.  Interestingly, I decided not to say he thought I was smarter than he was because I didn't want to sound insulting.  But somehow I managed to be even more insulting by saying I had more of a "capacity for greatness."  (And language.)

There's this great scene where both chefs are trying to explain to their staff how they want service to go that evening.  And they are both contradicting each other.  I love it for its simplicity and laid-bare truth. Then right after they contradict each other, Sebastien has to go get something from the kitchen and Michel defends him in explaining how the wait staff should explain the dishes.  He says that they worked on the poetry of the descriptions together, so the staff shouldn't muck it up.  So in the span of 20 seconds, they go from bickering to the father protecting the son.  That sounds like a true father/son relationship to me.

The family later explains that when Michel built his restaurant (which eventually went from one to three Michelin stars), his wife worked with him in the kitchen initially and then became the hostess.  

The lesbian couple, Pilar and Cate will have the same relationship.  And that this was passed on from Danny (the patriarch) having the same relationship with his ex-wife, Mona.

Diego, the youngest, who is running the restaurant at the top of the pilot is not married.  And this is a point of contention between father and son.  Danny believes that he needs a balance, a partner to help him.  Someone he trusts more than anyone.

Danny and Mona's relationship fell apart when she told him she wanted a life beyond the restaurant.  Once she was no longer in the intimate sphere of his life at work, she became an outsider.  And that created room for him to find other people to be loyal to him.  He saw her need for a life outside of him to be an act of betrayal.

Alex, the oldest son, is divorced.  And he needs to either reconcile with his wife or find someone new.  But until then, his mother will step in.  It gets a bit Oedipal.  

I love this scene where Sebastien is composing a dish and his sous follows behind him with the next element and they have this dance where they follow each other putting the next element on.  It's unspoken and completely shows their relationship to each other of absolute trust.

There's this sequence at the end of the film where Michel is looking out into the field, at twilight (bordering on heavy handedness), questioning his decision to hand over the restaurant.  He laments over the way Sebastien and his guys handle the harvest.  You can see the pain in him that he's got to leave a part of himself behind.  And it's not about ego, but it is such a part of who he is.  It's his legacy, what his son will have to do one day when his son, Alban, inevitably takes over.  Alban is probably six or seven in this documentary.  But it is already clear that the next generation is being groomed, even though Sebastien tells his grandparents that his son will be allowed to make his own decisions.  The grandmother tells him that he needs to make sure he follows in Sebastien's footsteps.

Probably the most beautiful sequence (besides Michel in the field) is when Sebastien is working on this desert he has been working on for the entire documentary.  He tried it one way at the start of the film.  They go to Japan and he tries it with Japanese ingredients.  Then he comes back and is working on it again.  This time he has simplified it to its most basic elements.  But then you flash to his grandparents kitchen and you see the grandmother working with the same milk skin and some chocolate on a piece of bread.  Back in the kitchen, Michel asks Sebastien what he is working on.

"It's the story of my life."

He explains the components of the dish.   The blackberry preserves and the cheese are from his mother.  The chocolate and the milk skin are from his grandmother.  He needs something that brings the savory into it because that represents him.  He hasn't yet figured out the story of his life on this plate.

Then you cut to a demonstration he's giving and he's got three dishes that now tell the story of his life.  He has broken it out.  There's a slow baked onion that is hollowed out and filled with some sort of goat cheese mixed with a chive vinaigrette.  Then you have the milk skin fried up and curled up with some blackberry gelee.  And a bunch of flowers around it--those represent his father and his mother and his grandmother.  Then there's an egg filled with a white substance that is topped with shaved chocolate.

It's this coda at the end that tells the story of his life in such a poetic way.  And the end of the film is Michel and his wife cooking dinner with Alban, while Sebastien watches.  In that moment, he looks at his son with his father, but he also flashes back to himself when he was young.

That is the story of his life.

My father would have been 70 in two days.  My father gave me my love of food.  He gave me my curiosity and my boldness about it.  I will try anything.  I am adventurous.  I associate one's willingness to try new things with their intelligence, their upbringing and how cultured they are.  In other words, I am a harsh judge when it comes to people and food.  Just like my Dad.  I don't like to have a lot of judgment about people, but that is something I can't let go of.  It's hard for me to get real close to you if you have a limited relationship with food or if you aren't open to new things.  I think it really speaks to someone's character.  It's just food.  You can try it and spit it out.  But in my estimation, you can't not try it.  That says something about you and your relationship to the world.

My mother and I (who is the only person in my life who I reserve judgment over in her unwillingness to try anything new) are going to have dim sum in my father's honor for his birthday.  I might even eat chicken feet in his honor.  I think watching Step Up to the Plate has brought back so many memories of me and my Dad.  It's also the core of why I'm writing this pilot.  The father/son relationship drives me.  Every time I have a great food experience: if I cook something great, if I try a new restaurant, if I geek out about a food product--I want to share that with my Dad.  It's a part of me that I LOVE and that doesn't come from my mother.  It comes solely from him.  Both of my Grandmothers were incredible cooks, so it's nice that it's in the bloodline.  But my Mom hates cooking.  I love food.  

I made fried rice earlier.  It's a food that I sustained myself on when I was living in New York and a broke grad student.  It's a food that I've eaten all of my life.  My father's fried rice was the best.  He made it with char siu, chinese barbecued pork.  Green onions.  Egg.  I have made it myself many ways.  I had it with smoked bacon once in a restaurant and decided that would be a great substitute for the char siu.  I've done it without meat and substituted tofu.  I love to douse it with Tabasco when it's piping hot.   It gets steamy and vinegary.  I love that smell and taste.  Sometimes I'll do chili garlic sauce.  I made it today and I didn't have any meat or tofu.  I could have just done egg.  Then I saw that we had left over hot dogs.  I threw it in.  That would have been a very Dad choice.  He would have used Spam if he had it because he was from Hawaii.  And sliced up hot dogs seemed very Hawaiian to me as well.  I stirred it up and saw the hot dog get charred a bit.  I love that dish.  Even though I make it with brown rice now.  I'm not a fan of white rice unless I'm making it with leftover rice from a chinese takeout dinner.  Then it's economical and I'm repurposing.  Otherwise, it's brown rice for me.

I don't like going to grave sites to visit people.  I hate looking at tombstones because I find it pointless.  I'm visiting a site where a body is decaying or has completely disintegrated into the soil.  And my Dad was cremated, so there isn't anywhere to visit him.  My grandmother is buried at a cemetery, but I don't go that often.  I like to remember them through stories or through the food they cooked: my Grandmother's enchiladas, posole or tamales at Christmas time; or my Dad's fried rice, his tomato beef (or Beef Tomato, as he called it) or a fried egg on top of a steaming bowl of rice with soy sauce sprinkled on it for breakfast.  But the things that I eat that I remember my Dad for the most are the things he'd go out for: Del Taco hard shell tacos (only on Tuesdays when they're a steal), dim sum, pastrami sandwiches, pate, steaks, corned beef hash.  I love all food, like I love all people: high-end, low-end, rich, poor, of all ethnicities, flavors and persuasions.  That's how my Dad rolled and that's what he taught me.

There's going to be scenes where the family is cooking both inside and outside the restaurant.  Food is another character in this script--their relationship to it reflects their relationship with each other in all of its ambivalence and love for all of it.  This is a story of legacy and how a father knew that the only thing he could give his children was a love of food and that love would give them their values and a sense of who they were.

On a plate, he presented me with The Story of My Life.