Francis Mallmann: leading a rebellion against harmony

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 14, 2005 by Bret Thorn

What's your management style?

I remember in one of those restaurants in France I was working with a garde-manger, and we used to clean 12 lobsters every day. The chef would look at them and throw six away. I couldn't tell the difference between the ones he kept and the ones he threw away, so I asked him why he threw them away, and he said, "Because I really hate the owner; he's a horrible man." I don't want to run a restaurant that way. If you have restaurants all around, you can't be everywhere. You have to have staff members who have the same attitude toward the restaurant as you do.

You use a lot of Argentine products in your cooking. How did that come about?

There's a school of thought among youngsters in Argentina that the best is elsewhere, and in some ways that's quite right. I always dreamed of going to Europe and America, and after doing that and being quite successful I looked at myself and said: "It's just copying, what I'm doing. It's very hollow." So I traveled throughout Argentina and saw that we had so much to show. Now I'm really proud when I see that my clients in the United States have had a taste of what we really are. I'm really glad that I've found new [culinary] language that has really changed what I do.

CHEF'S TIPS

* To prevent meat from curling or becoming chewy when cooking it at high heat, smash it on wood to break down the muscles.

* When cooking on a very hot grill, don't move whatever you put on the grill for the first minute or so. People get very impatient, or they see the smoke and think "I have to move it." and they ruin what they're doing.