Mark Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…Robot chefs. You’ve seen these machines now that they are going to have that are going to dice everything and you won’t need any human interaction at all. What do you think of that? Would anybody notice? [laughter] I think fast food . . . I think that our model in the United States because of the real estate and economics of it is completely wrong. I think that a chef should open a restaurant at 10 seats; I think he should charge $100, and I think he should make $150, and he should not pay rent. Or have labor, or have overhead, or costs. What you should do is honor the tradition of respecting the individual. In Japan they have this policy of not first customer. There is a policy of not taking you because they don’t know how you are going to act; they don’t know who you are. You’re eating with seven or eight other people as an ensemble. You’re not completely separate, so the idea of reinstituting cultural and social space and bonds and honoring — the chef is here to put something down. There is no waitress; there is no menu. That’s a personal connection, that’s like your mother. That point to me is that we have to go back to understanding that food is very part of our psychological sense of space, our body sense of space, our pleasurable sense of space, our own cultural identity. If we let other people take over that by organic, or this, or labels, or price, then what we have done is given part of our lives up and I don’t know that we’re . . . I’m just saying — there’s 300 noodle places in Kyoto. Nobody charges more than $10 or $12. They’re all really good, they’re all a little bit different, and guess who doesn’t do well? Chains that charge $10 for noodles that they have to pay a high-end real estate, like Yoshinoya. There’s two of them in Kyoto. I’ve been going to Kyoto 50 years. I’ve never been; I’m never going to go. There is no reason to go. Chains only exist when the local community doesn’t provide the same service. So in a street-food market it’s accessible: I can eat in Thailand a quail for 75 cents. That same quail in Washington, DC, and New York City will cost me like $18.95. [laughter] Megan, Mark, thank you very much.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.