Interview Filmmaker Sally Rowe and chef Paul Liebrandt

Patton Oswalt has that great bit about chefs being the new rockstars: fiery, temperamental, half-insane. And our culture is obsessed with them, to the point where people would probably tune in just to watch Gordon Ramsay sit there and eat a sandwich. But there’s a more delicate madness to Paul Liebrandt, a British expat who moved to New York in 2001 to launch his career as a chef. Known for bizarre, boggling taste combinations (eel and violets, foie gras and calf brains), Liebrandt’s approach to fine dining has endeared him to many critics and diners, while alienating him from others.

A Matter Of Taste: Serving Up Paul Liebrandt, the first feature from Sally Rowe, follows Paul over the course of almost a decade as he works through kitchens in New York City establishing a name for himself and his cuisine. Though the film itself is tight (running just over an hour), Rowe provides a strong sense of the trials of a young chef trying to distinguish himself in the world of fine dining, especially in a post-9/11 climate that was gravitating towards bistro-style comfort food. A Matter Of Taste is a compelling portrait of Liebrandt, who, though refreshingly down-to-earth, is still capable of those explosive bursts of profanity we’ve come to expect from rockstar chefs. But it also considers the role of ideas like “fine dining” and “gastronomy” in contemporary culture.

In town this week as the film opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox, Rowe and Liebrandt have been working with Jason Bangerter, the Executive Chef at the Lightbox's in-house resto LUMA, who is recreating a signature Paul Liebrandt dish to be served after the screening on opening night. The A.V. Club spoke with the director and her subject about the film, Paul’s cuisine, and how increasingly savvy (and budget-conscious) diners are changing the landscape of fine dining.

The A.V. Club: Sally, when did you first come across Paul and his food?

Sally Rowe: I met Paul in 2000 when he was at Atlas. I ate at the restaurant and became really interested in what Paul was doing at that time. Nobody in the U.S. was cooking the way he was. His flavour combinations and his texture combinations were really interesting. And there was a philosophy behind his food. I really wanted to meet Paul. We got to know each other and became friends. When he went to Papillon, I asked if I could start filming him.

AVC: Do you remember what that first meal was?

SR: It was a palette cleanser, an apple-wasabi sorbet. It’s in the film. There was olive oil on it. It was lovely.

AVC: Did the idea of making a film about Paul come immediately after this?

SR: No, but I knew the restaurant scene. I’d worked in restaurants. But when we started filming in 2001, the food craze hadn’t really kicked in. The Food Network wasn’t really what it was today, and all those cooking shows weren’t happening. I thought it’d be interesting to film world-class top chefs cook. We’d never really seen that. I wanted to look behind the curtain into fine dining kitchens. We did shoot in other kitchens, but we kept coming back to Paul. It’s hard to get an idea of taste with a visual medium, but Paul’s food lends itself to that.

AVC: Paul, did you immediately take to the idea of being filmed? It seems like with running your own kitchens, it’d be a lot of added pressure.

Paul Liebrandt: Well, the film was done over the course of nine and a half years. It’s not like every single minute of those nine and a half years I was opening a restaurant. When it started, it was just a fly-on-the-wall capturing of what we, as chefs, do on a daily basis. I didn’t think much of it. It just went on and on. I just lived life and Sally captured it. She did all the work. I didn’t really have to do much.

AVC: When you did get to opening your new restaurant, were the cameras and the production ever a problem? Had you grown accustomed to it by then?

PL: I’d kind of gotten used to it. I did kick Sally out several times, obviously. Sally’s very respectful of the process of how a kitchen runs and the stresses and day-to-day of running a restaurant at the level that we do. She was very discrete with the cameras and who she brought in. That made it easier for me. I focused on what I was doing, and Sally focused on capturing what I was doing. 

AVC: The first part of the film focuses on how when you first came to New York, a lot of your dishes and flavour combinations alienated some people. Why do you think that was?

PL: I wouldn’t say it was the food so much. It’s not really about one particular dish I did; that depends on taste and whether you like someone’s food or not. It was more because I was this young guy who was not French or American, but British. And there still aren’t any male British chefs in this country. I don’t really count Gordon Ramsay, because he’s not really cooking. But nobody young and brash had come to New York to make their name.

I came to New York right before 9/11, and the film starts just a few months after 9/11. Moving to a new country right when an event like that happens is very, very difficult. A lot of the stuff that I did back then was very creative, very forward-thinking, something not a lot of people were doing. And at that time, maybe it wasn’t necessarily what people wanted. But I was trying to make a name for myself. It was a very difficult time to come to New York and start a life.

AVC: A large part of the film’s arc is built around you wanting to score a three-star rating in The New York Times. Does it ever feel like there’s too much importance placed on things like this?

PL: Well, I had three stars at my first restaurant before the movie had began. I already had three stars. To come to New York and get a rating like that does upset people. It’s like you haven’t paid your dues or something. You know, “Who’s this guy?” That’s really what the backlash was, if anything. The critics’ ratings are important when you’re a young chef. As I get older, it really is more about the customer. It’s about what they like. If someone comes in every single week, they’re the ones that are demanding me to be creative. They want something new. That’s why they come back.

Pressure-wise, everyone wants a good review. There’s no chef that doesn’t. You put a lot of money in. A lot. And a lot of work. And you want to be well received. But sometimes the timing is off. It may not be the right trend in dining or something. There is no rule book. Sometimes it gets into a grey area of whether you’re reviewing style over substance. Sometimes style weighs out, with people not reviewing the restaurant for what it is. Sometimes it’s, “I don’t like this style of food.” But reviews are very necessary and very important in a lot of ways. It’s important to have them like you. It is.

AVC: As far as the customers go, Sally mentioned the whole “food boom” that’s happened in the past decade—do you think this has democratized or demystified fine dining for a lot of people, or made it easier for people to develop their palates?

PL: I think knowledge is a wonderful thing. The more people who are exposed to different levels of cuisine lifts the veil back a bit. It makes it a little less scary. And it makes people want to try your restaurant. They’re much more open-minded. I think the days of grandiose cuisine are fading. Gastronomy—in the traditional French, white glove sense—is dying in many ways. It’s more of a casual approach now. It’s more of an economic stance than cultural stance. But people are more aware of good food, to a degree, and I think that’s a good thing. They get to understand what they’re eating, and they enjoy it more.

AVC: There’s been some talk that when the film premières at the Lightbox, the restaurant upstairs is going to be serving some of Paul’s dishes. Sally, is it important to you to try and use Paul’s food itself to promote the film?

SR: I think we’ll promote it any we can, to try and get people interested. But I think a thing that’s really important to remember about the film it that it’s not just for foodies. The film is about a young, talented person trying to make it in New York, and he just happens to be a chef.