Chef David Burke Reveals Answers To All Of Our Best Foodie Questions - Exclusive Interview

You're known as the "culinary prankster." Can you talk about what that means?

It's the element of surprise and making people laugh. It keeps it interesting. At the end of the day, we're nurturing people. The word "hospitality" comes from "hospital" –  it's nurturing, and no matter how you do it, it's hard work, so you've got to have a little fun. 

What are some of the best culinary pranks that you've done?

Some of the pranks we've done on other employees have been quite fun, although not always politically correct. But pranking can be in the way you serve a dish. For example, the lollypop tree we made for our cheesecake, or putting bacon on a clothesline, serving it with clothespins. Or, the time I cooked for Thomas Keller and Joe [Bastianich] in Napa, and I made a watercress and escargot soup. We had local snails, live in the shells. We boiled some, but I also kept some alive. So I put the soup in a bowl — hot, really green, watercress, snail, garlic soup, and I took the live snails and slapped them right on the rim of the plate and they stuck to the rim and their heads shot out because it was hot, and I was like, "That's your escargot soup." We didn't torture the snail, but we surprised everybody.

That reminds me of the time on Top Chef when you had the competitors to your Townhouse restaurant, and there was a dish involving live goldfish.

I think we gave them goldfish to use in presenting a dish on top of the bowl. Say you had a glass bowl and you put water in it with the fish, maybe some seaweed, and then you'd put a salad on top of that on a plate, so that became part of the theme of the dish or the uniqueness of how we served it. Now, we used to do little baby crabs the size of a snail — used to get them from Korea live. We would put these live crabs underneath warm peppercorns and we would put hot oysters on top of the peppercorns, but as you were eating them, they would crawl to the top. They would start coming out of the "sand" — really the salt and pepper — and all of a sudden you'd see a little baby claw come out. To me, I just think that adds something to the conversation and the "Wow, look at this s***, something's moving." 

We also did crickets on a pizza, we did crickets frozen into ice cubes, and we served lobster on a bed of nails — like a florist would use. And sometimes it really makes sense to hang bacon from a clothesline. It's just that nobody's ever done it. Why wouldn't you hang bacon and render the fat down, use the clothespins as a chopstick. So that became an instant hit.

What was it like being one of the youngest chefs on the burgeoning New York City restaurant scene? 

I got to New York in '84 and worked for Daniel Boulud, then for Charlie Palmer as sous chef at the River Café. I had been working with a really talented couple of chefs before that, and I was a really good cook, and I had worked in Europe already. But New York was a boiling little pot — simmering to get respect for American food. You had French restaurants all over the Upper East Side and of the top 20 restaurants, 12 of them were French. So after two years at River Café, I went to France for two or three months and worked for various really great restaurants before coming back as executive chef. 

Before going back,  I told Buzzy [O'Keeffe -- the owner of the River Café], "I don't know if I can handle this job." I was just 25 or 26. He goes, "You're doing the job now and the whole staff thinks you can do it," which was a real vote of confidence because I thought the waiters hated me. I was very demanding on them, I wanted perfection, but they respected me. And then Buzzy and I made a deal to send me to pastry school in Paris and then come back as chef. 

Were you the youngest chef at a top restaurant?

I had to be. Listen, I'm still on the young side compared to all the guys I came up with ... Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, all the guys you read about. Eric Ripert's on the younger side, and we were probably around the same age. But at 26, to be running a three-star restaurant was impossible. More important, I was following Larry Forgione and Charlie Palmer. That was a big task, and I was nervous. I knew how to cook, but I didn't know how to run a business yet and run a kitchen, but I guess I was doing it without realizing you're actually doing it. I wasn't doing the ordering as much, and I wasn't doing the payroll, but Buzzy flanked me with the right people to do it. He said, "I just want you to create and cook." So I did.

So, the adrenaline factor...

Hundred percent. Being nervous to me creates great energy. Because I love the challenge and I don't like failing, so it's like I got up nervous every day and went to work and turned that nervous energy into productivity and creativity.  I could do whatever I wanted, and my imagination, my creativity was boundless. Let's do this, let's do this. I built a beautiful team of people and we knocked it out. We represented the United States that first year in the Culinary Olympics in Tokyo. I was 26, and we won two gold medals, it was fantastic.

I remember hearing that the all the top NYC chefs back in the day would hang out at some restaurant or other after hours?

You had Blue Ribbon, and a couple of other chef hangouts. We'd work until 11 or 12 and then go there and eat dinner. In New York, you could serve until three, four in the morning. We'd all gather and shoot the s***. It was a fun time, because it was all new to us, and that's how we communicated. There was no Instagram then. We'd compare dishes and eat some oysters, drink some wine and swap stories.

What's it like competing against these other chefs — like Bobby Flay — who were part of that scene? 

It's like playing one on one basketball with them. It's very respectful. But we're still very competitive at the end of the day. I competed with Jean-Louis Palladin in the early days of the Food Network, and he got upset when I beat him. He got visibly upset. I went to pastry school, so I made deserts that were so good, and I beat him on that. I loved the guy, but I'm playing to win, man, I'm playing to win. Jean-Louis Palladin — I beat him, and he wouldn't share a cab with me. It was twisted, he was throwing things on the ground, but he was mad at himself, not me. I'm like, "Hey, have a nice day, take it easy." But he liked me a lot, and he was an older French guy, not that much older, but he was hot s***. 

Now Bobby, I always admired Bobby because he was very humble at the beginning, and he also gave credit when credit was due. He had respect for me and I liked that he came out swinging. He wasn't at the French level of food, but he pioneered the Southwestern stuff, and he works hard. I think he's very good on TV, he's had some success in the restaurants, he's a well-known person, he's certainly successful, he's always been nice to me. When I was on Iron Chef with Bobby, I didn't see everything he made, but I honestly I thought he did a better job.

Would you consider a rematch?

Hundred percent. I would love it. Put it in the article, and demand an answer by sundown. Bobby'll get a kick out of it, it will be fun. He comes up to Saratoga in the summer, I usually see him up there, he comes to our restaurant. What's fun about a guy like Bobby or any of the other girls or guys that have been in the city since the '80s is you shared a lot of stuff together. Your paths are cemented, you're talking about four decades in the same city cooking together. You've seen a lot, all the comings and goings. So the people still standing deserve credit. It's a brutal business.

I know you've said that Donald Trump did not put ketchup on the steak he ordered at your D.C. restaurant, BLT Prime, but what would be so wrong with ketchup on steak? 

Nothing. Ketchup is a wonderful condiment, it's the most popular condiment in the world. Here's the idea of ketchup: Ketchup was designed for a couple of reasons, the number one reason is for digestion. That's why you put it on things that are fatty, like French fries, same as barbecue sauce, same as vinaigrette. All of these condiments are digestive aids, they help you digest fatty foods. It's got cloves and poultry seasoning in it and tomatoes and vinegar and sugar, and molasses. It also adds lots of flavor. My father likes steak with ketchup. If you eat hamburgers with ketchup, why can't you eat steak with ketchup? If your mother was the one that makes ketchup on top of your meatloaf, why can't you eat ketchup with steak? By the way, A1 Sauce and Worcestershire is not that much different than ketchup.

Is there anything you shouldn't have ketchup on? Like eggs or chicken?

I think you should put ketchup on everything, if you like ketchup. Life is too short, man. Life's too short to be having rules about ketchup. And if you want to talk about well-done steak and how people think it's sacrilege, that's another f***ing miss.

Yes, please talk about well-done steak.

Here's the well-done thing, because I got asked by a food critic, "Isn't it disgusting that Donald Trump eats his steak well-done?" I said, "Well, let me explain a couple things to

you. My father eats well done steak and my father's a good man. I would never tell my father that he doesn't know what he's doing when it comes to food, because he put

food on my table for years." But let me tell you something, a good steak — well-done — is still juicy and moist, because it has enough fat content. Look at short ribs, they're well-done. Pot roast, well-done. So a good marbled steak well-done is still a good steak. Now, I've judged many competitions, and the more you cook a steak, the better it tastes. Period. You can't argue with that because the caramelization that occurs creates a Maillard reaction. You know what tastes good on the outside of a roast turkey or ham? The skin, you know why? It's caramelized. Do you know why a hamburger's not boiled and it's grilled?  Because it tastes better, you know why onion rings taste better fried? Because they're browned, when you caramelize things they get tastier. That's why English food sucks — because it was boiled. You didn't get any caramelization. 

How did you come up with the Himalayan salt method of dry-aging beef?

People send me things because they know I'm creative, so the salt people sent me salt. It was sitting on my desk for like a year. I'd invented something called Flavor Sprays — fat-free, calorie-free, carb-free, diabetic-friendly flavored waters in little mist bottles. We had 35 flavors, bacon, blue cheese, Parmesan, birthday cake, strawberry, maple, all these flavors. They were selling like hotcakes. So I said, "You know what? If I can get dry aged beef flavor, all that umami into a bottle, I don't have to age all my steaks and my filet mignon could taste better." 

So I gave this food scientist a piece of dry aged meat from my cooler at Park Avenue Café, and they analyzed it and came back to me, saying, "This is the most complicated thing for us to analyze from a flavor profile. You've got fat, you've got bone, you've got flesh, you've got decay, you've got mold, you've got umami, you've got blood, but the most interesting thing is that the number one flavor profile in your dry aged steak is cardboard."

I was like, "What?" He said, "Yeah, cardboard. It's interesting, right?" I said, "I'll be goddamned." He goes, "Do you leave the meat in the cardboard box?" I said, "No," but I went back to my refrigerator and noticed cardboard boxes on the floor, so I said to myself, if that cardboard could be absorbed by the meat, why wouldn't salt?" So if I replaced the cardboard with a whole wall of salt, now the salt air will go inside the steak. We were working on one invention to be able to create dry aged flavor in liquid form, and we came up with an aging process.

How'd they like it on Iron Chef?

On Iron Chef, I did a lamb carpaccio on the salt. One of the judges, she's like, "Oh, my god. David, I don't like lamb, and then you give me raw lamb." I said, "Well, if you don't like lamb, why are you judging?" Nah, I didn't say anything. But I put the salt on TV and just wanted to show off. Our theme was lamb, but I had a dish called Angry Lobster that was so beautiful — served on a bed of nails. So I made Angry Lobster and put it with lamb fritters, because I thought, "Let me show this dish to America, I don't care if I win or lose. I want to show them what we can do, because at the end of the day, nobody cares if you win or lose on the show, it's who put out the best product."

Did you always know you wanted to be a chef?

I was with some high school friends, and they were like, "You wanted to be a chef when you were a sophomore in high school. How did you know?" I'm like, "I didn't know anything about where it would take me." I just knew that there was something in it that made me happy to produce and cook and create and be part of a team, and be able to see a finished product on a daily basis. You don't have to wait a year to see the project done, you make something and you're part of a team. I think that was part of it. I also think there's a hospitality gene in certain people. You understand you're doing something good. 

Was your family supportive?

When I got in the restaurant business, it was a bad choice of career. Everybody told me that. It was in the late '70s and you didn't get into it because it was respected, you didn't get into for the money, you didn't get into it for the fame. Being a chef was nothing back then. My dad says to me, "David, what is this talk about you want to be a chef or cook or whatever?" 

I said, "Yeah, dad." I'm a smart kid, I'm a good athlete, I'm a pretty good boy in school, a little bit of a rascal, a little bit of a prankster. 

My dad goes, "David, I know you smoke pot. I just didn't realize how much. Why the hell would you want to be a chef? Are you stoned?" 

It was like telling your father, "I want to be a maid. I want to be a janitor." Being a cook was not looked upon as a profession. It was something you did without an education. First of all, you didn't need a license for it, you still don't, which baffles me. Here's a profession, you could poison somebody, and you don't need a license. But in order to fix their toilet, you do.

I understand you're also a puppeteer?

Amateur puppeteer, yes. I'm proud of that.

Can you talk about your puppet assistant, Lefto?

Entertaining people with Lefto, that was fun actually.

Any plans for Lefto going forward?

Yeah, Lefto, he's been dating a little lately, so I gave him a break. He's got a girlfriend — a female puppet, her name is Nutmeg — she's a mixologist, so she's going to teach drinks, and I'm going to teach, through Lefto, how to cook for a woman you meet on a dating site, like how to cook your first date meal.

Seriously? I'd watch.

It's educational, it's humorous, and it gives you tips on dating and cooking and drinks.