Eat My Globe

Interview with Dale Talde

Simon Majumdar “(SM”):

Welcome to Eat My Globe, a podcast about things you didn't know you didn't know about food. And today we have a very special guest, Dale Talde. Dale's passion for cooking began at a young age in his native Chicago, where he learned to prepare meals alongside his mother in the kitchen. The proud son of Filipino immigrants, he grew up immersed in his family's cultural heritage while enjoying the life of a typical American kid. You'll have to tell me more about that later. In 2018, Dale became business partners with his life partner. Dale and Agnes built Food Crush Hospitality dot com. They opened Goosefeather in 2019 and in 2020, Esquire magazine named Goosefeather to its best restaurant list. In 2022, Dale was nominated for a James Beard Award. Best chef in New York. Dale has appeared on many TV shows in September of 2015 he published this wonderful wonderful book which Grand Central published “Asian American” to rave reviews I should mention to everyone listening that Filipino food is one of my great passions. I have been married to a Filipino lady for nearly eighteen years here. Although she's not a cook herself, whenever I go with her to the Philippines, my passion for the food comes to the fore from Dinuguan to Bagnet, from Pinakbet to Lechon Kawalis. So, I am so pleased to have a phenomenal Philippine American chef on the show and we shall see he's not an archetype of the normal Philippine chef. It is my very great pleasure to present the one and only Dale Talde. How are you doing?

Dale Talde (“DT”):

I'm well Simon. Thank you so much for having me.

SM:

So welcome to Eat My Globe. Now while we start, I think that you were one of the first kind of Filipino chefs in the country. How did that come about? Because Filipino food was something that was only designed to feed Filipino people in New York, in London, and but now it's gone all over the globe. So, tell me about how that started and how you were involved in it.

DT:

Yeah, more than Filipino food, I had a passion for just food and cooking in general. Obviously we've met a few times prior to me doing Tournament of Champions, but when I got on Tournament of Champions, I think it was season five, I got on and not a lot of people knew me. It's because I've been doing this a long time, you know, I've been.

SM:

Yes, I know, I know.

DT:

I graduated in ‘98 of culinary school from CIA and have been cooking ever since. And I to my mom was an avid Food Network and that's food cooking show. She was really more cooking show in general. We were just such big fans of it. But I just loved food. And I think when I opened, I was able to open my first restaurant, Talde in Brooklyn. That's when I really said to myself, I'm going to explore this Filipino side of me. I think part of being a Filipino chef is also understanding that, and I think with a lot of people who are first generation Americans and sons and daughters of immigrants, is that we have this idea, there's an idea that we have that we almost kind of don't belong anywhere. We're not Filipino enough, we're not authentic enough for true Filipinos, but we're also from the color of our skin, to the shape of our eyes, to the texture of our hair, we aren't American to a lot of people. So, we have this kind of weird limbo a lot of times. So, what do we do with that? We just kind of create our own cuisine. And I think right now you're starting to see a lot of, with just not just Filipinos, right? There's the Paul Quis, myself, there's in LA, there's tons of chefs, there's Leah Cohen, there's, there's. . .

SM:

Chef Olalia is one of our favorites. One of our absolute favourites.

DT:

Yeah, absolutely the last winner of Top Chef, Rhoda, Filipinos. And these people, Sheldon, who's Filipino Hawaiian, we start embracing this side of our culture and who we are, but through the lens of someone who also goes to school and gets square pizzas and tater tots when we were in the lunch line.

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

Right? So there's this melding of this. You look at the Kasama guys, the only Michelin star Filipino restaurant in the country, and you look at them and you go, they have that reckless, I'm just gonna cook the food that I like, and it happens to be Filipino influence, but it also is taking, you're having sinigang with black cod.

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

That doesn't exist, but they are making it their own and it's delicious. I think really, I think there's, a couple people that we owe this to, right? I think there's the Roy Choi's of the world. I think people like David Chang, I think there's people like him who just threw caution to the wind and said to themselves, I'm cooking the food that makes me happy. Whether my Korean side, my aunts and my uncles come here and say, this isn't Korean food. My, listen, my mom and my aunt came here and said the same thing. This isn't Filipino food, Dale. And I said, it was never meant to be Filipino food. It's Filipino food because I am Filipino descent and it's coming from my hands. But I never said this was traditional Filipino food and I'm okay with that. And I think everyone else needs to get okay with that.

SM:

Ha ha ha.

I agree with you because I'm half Indian, half British, you know, Welsh. And so, my mother who was Welsh used to cook, and I mentioned this later. She used to cook fish stick curry because there wasn't anything else, and that's all she could do. And then she went India and got all these ingredients but brought them back and it was a time of real what's the word wildness in what she did but it was fantastic.

Now let's talk about your book because I I'll be honest I hadn't seen this book before and I've been reading it the whole time I've got it. Because you have this phrase in there called “Proudly Inauthentic.” And that's obviously coming from what you were talking about. So, tell us what that meant, because you came up with that event.

DT:

Yeah, I first of all, when we came up with the book title and actually the cuisine of my first restaurant, I owe this a lot to a very good friend of mine, Kong Fan, who is also an Asian American, who is also sons of immigrants and a first generation American. And when we came up with it, like, what are we calling, the tagline? I think it's so important when you have a marketing of. . .

SM:

Yeah. It's fun.

DT:

. . . a restaurant, right? What do you call it? Steven Starr also said one of those things where he said, if you're standing at a corner in New York City and there's six of you there, when you're saying what food do you want, there has to be a one-liner that gets you there, right?

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

So, we're coming up with this idea. What is my food? Modern Asian, no, no. No, he said, dude, who are you? You're an Asian American. Call it that. So, I think there was this ownership of, sense of ownership when it comes to cultural and identity, right? I am proudly inauthentic. This all happened one time when I was at my, like a lot of us who've come here. My mom was a nurse. There was the healthcare boom in the 70s.

SM:

My, my mum was a nurse too, so. . . .

DT:

So, we share that, right? I was in the hospital, my brother had appendectomy. And when I went into my brother's hospital room, we were at the hospital that my mom worked at. Her friends were taking care of my brother. So, I walk into this room and they're all speaking my mom's native dialect, which is Ilonggo, not Tagalog. So, my mom's from Iloilo, which is the Visayans, which is more central Philippines. And I heard them say, Ilonggo.

SM:

So, what was the language again? Sorry, what was the language again?

DT:

Ilonggo, it's not Tagalog. Yeah, my mom's. . .

SM:

So okay. Yeah.

DT:

. . . not, she doesn't speak that dialect. You know, it's 7,000 islands. There's a ton of dialects.

SM:

Of course.

DT:

So, I overheard one of the nurses say, he's not Filipino. To me, as I'm speaking there, and that resonated so much with me, and I felt almost betrayed a little bit because I felt like, if you don't think I'm Filipino, then I don't belong anywhere. I've been saying I'm Filipino my whole life. And I really understood that to them, I wasn't Filipino enough and to a regular America, I definitely wasn't blonde haired, blue eyes, I didn't belong.

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

So, for the longest, I had this chip on my shoulder, like where am I and where's, where do I belong? And as I got older through food and through kind of this conversation of, what do call the restaurant? It's identifying that, that you need to be proud of inauthenticity. There's gatekeepers of authenticity and we were not doing that. We were taking the lead from the people like Roy Choi and who were, Roy Choi was doing Korean food in a taco inspired by his LA roots. And it's like, you never heard of that before. And then it became a thing. David Chang was just doing food that he loved to eat. To me was like, Tin Ho was the chef at Sambar was one of the people who I went into that restaurant and was like, what is this magic happening here? You knew that these were sons and daughters of immigrants that were just owning the fact that they're cooking the way they want to cook, obviously inspired by their culture and where their parents are from, but I'm not from the Philippines. I am Filipino of Filipino descent, but I'm not from there. So, the food that I was cooking could never be a hundred percent Filipino. So, I think that's where that tagline proudly inauthentic was, is that we were starting to, I was starting to own my identity and it through food more than anything else. So, I owe it a lot to people, but it really was just claiming my identity.

SM:

I love that. I absolutely love that. But tell me about do you go to the Philippines?

DT:

Actually, we're headed there in January, but I've been three times. Once when I was younger, once actually you might know Ilan Hall from season two of Top Chef, sees the chef there. We went together in the early 2000s and then I went back about seven or eight years ago and then I'm headed back this January.

SM:

Oh that's fantastic. And I know that your parents then came from remind me of the name of where they're. . . .

DT:

My mom's from Iloilo and my dad's from a province called Negros Occidental.

SM:

Oh okay. For me again, the areas, the people I went down to Ilocos this time, right up on the which has the most wonderful food.

So, I want to talk to you about your mother for a while. I know that when you came over to the United States, she cooked this kind of Filipino American food. And that's where I guessed you got this this kind of feeling about Filipino Americans. So, can you tell me about that? Because she sounds like she was a real, well, is a really great cook.

DT:

So, my mom's a wonderful cook and that question's awesome because I think a lot of times when you see have immigrants who come here and they can't substitute, they can't find things that are native to their culture and substitute other things. My mom was pretty much a stickler. She was able to cook what, if she didn't have something, she didn't cook it. She wanted to keep the flavors true to what she remembered. But there's one thing that influenced my mom so much and influenced my cooking. My mom owned like a lot of immigrants, right? There's food at home.

SM:

Yeah. Yeah.

DT:

We wanted to eat fast food. We wanted to go eat here. My mom would say there's food at home. The. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . one thing that we can get my mom to eat. And I think she was like, this was like a revelation to her. When she came, it's fried chicken and it's KFC. Kentucky fried. . .

SM:

Well that's. . .

DT:

. . . chicken was one of those things. And we just, we didn't get the sides. We got a little coleslaw every once in while, but she would get a bucket. And this really, I think shaped a lot of my, we'd get KFC and my mom would make a pot of rice and we would have KFC and rice. And it was one of those things where it was an aha moment for me because I love fried chicken, like everybody else, right? My memories of fried chicken aren't the biscuit, the mashed potatoes, the corn, all that. It was really just a giant bucket of original and a pot of rice and I think that it speaks to. . . it speaks so much of immigrants like we're gonna eat something that we found here that we actually love but we're making sure to eat it with something that is a part of our heart so my mom's. . . we'd never get the we'd never get fried chicken or we'd never get the mashed potatoes we'd never get mac and cheese it's always a pot of rice and that was like my mom's soft spot. To this day, we want to, if like, mom, you don't cook, let's go get fried chicken. She's like, okay, I'll make the pot of rice. It's one of those things that it, it, it sounds, it's common now because Jollibee has chicken joy and you get gravy and rice. But when you're talking like 20, 25, 30 years ago, no one was doing that.

SM:

Yeah, and that reminds me again, my wife loves we go to each restaurant, say we go to a Vietnamese, in fact we've done this recently. We've been to Vietnamese, we've been to a Malaysian, we've been and at every point Sybil goes, We'll have some fried chicken wings to begin with and our thing is, oh, I'm going to write about them and see how different they are. That's not the reason. The reason is she loves fried chicken. So that reminds me of her and it's but she does love Jollibee’s. I want to know what do you think of Jollibee’s?

DT:

Oh I love it. I think that any way you can get, mean, is it, listen, I think you also have to order smartly when you're there, right? I think. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . you know, the sweet spaghetti is not hitting for me. Chicken Joy, the original is banging. They do a soup, the glass noodle soup, Miswa, I think it's called Miswa. I like that. I like it. It almost comes off as a porgy because the noodles are so hammered. They're so cooked to death that like, it just becomes. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . this porridge. But I mean, is it like, that is such a Filipino thing, like we are people who low and slow and long time is right up our alley. Like. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . we like that soul food, right? The Gullah cuisine, I think all those kind of all those cuisines, the longer it sits, the better it gets. I think there's a lot of commonality between a lot of those cuisines that come from not a lot. Find a lot of like, turkey. You find turkey wings braised down in gravy and you'll find turkey wings here in the States. That's another thing is turkey wing adobo, right around Thanksgiving. You'll find a lot of that. It's like. . .

SM:

Oh yeah.

DT:

. . . where did you guys come up with that? It's like, well, no one really ate the turkey when you made it. So, we turned it into something that we actually want to eat because whoever made the turkey originally, it was terrible. So, we jazzed it up and made it into an adobo and now it's delicious.

SM:

It's just when I was visiting last year in the Philippines, her mother, who's ninety and we went for her ninetieth birthday, she still had a whole lechon and she cook took like the jowls she has a cook and who mixed them with different things and so it became more Filipino. Lechon is very good anyway, but that's exactly what she does. So, I really appreciate that.

So anyway, where if you have any type of fast food, I'm guessing if you look back it's gonna be KFC, but do you. . . I know you have kind of fast food that comes into your cooking now and I was going to talk about that like you've got this Crab Rangoon that you you've got with mascarpone and I'm just like, where does that come from? Where do those things come from in your mind where you go, I've got this and this, can these be together? Because that's something that not many people have. I, I'm a cook, I do all of this, but I'm a very straightforward cook, and you have this very out there style. If that's not. . .

DT:

I, thank you. I appreciate that. I think that that's what makes us unique and fun and special. But what I think is. . . inspiration comes from everywhere and living in New York, landing in New York in 2005. I immediately beelined it to Chinatown is to me, there's. . .

SM:

So good.

DT:

. . . nothing more New York than walking in Chinatown, especially during the holidays and seeing how Chinatown delivers on Thanksgiving when you see whole turkeys hanging in the window and you're like, they just Peking roasted a turkey. But that was my walk. I lived on Allen and Delancey for a long time and. . .

SM:

Yep. Okay.

DT:

. . . we're right next to, I lived underneath Kanji Village there on Allen Street. And I tell people, I tell cooks and younger chefs, go, you need to find your voice. And your voice, the voice through your food is probably the most important thing because all of us can do, let's be very realistic about it. All of us can make Cacio e Pepe really well. We can, because we've seen it done a million times. Most of us have the technique down. Some is better than others. But when it comes to unique food, I think you have to find your voice. And finding your voice, is partly through inspiration and you have to be so open all the time when you're finding inspiration. Inspiration could come through anywhere. So, for me, a lot of those moments were just walking to work through Chinatown. And I'm not talking about looking at produce and it's just the smells, the feel, the attitude. What's hanging in these windows when you see the char siu barbecue, the roast meat places.

So that's where I think a lot of this inspiration happens because you walk through Chinatown and then I had to go to when I was working at Budokan and Morimoto you then you land in Chelsea and then you're walking through Chelsea Piers or Chelsea Market and there's great Italian restaurants. There's Thai restaurants. There's a butcher that you know, everything there's grass-fed and ethically raised. So, you can't get you can't help but to be inspired by that and through talking to people in this melting pot of where you're working. We had 90 back of the house employees there, everywhere from Guangzhou, China, to Pakistan, to. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . guys from Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, and just talk to them and find what excites them about food. Or, say, if you make family meal, what do you want? What do you want to make for family meal? And letting them make it and be like, I never saw this going in that direction, but amen. Like, you asked for beans, you asked for, chicken wings, you asked for masa, and then all of a sudden you just had this most wonderful family meal that like, it just blows your mind.

SM:

I know when I've been invited or tried to have yeah, the family meals in restaurants, they're just exceptional and I love that. I actually, when I started in the Food Network eighteen years ago now, I used to go. . . that's where the Iron Chef when I started doing Iron Chef and Next Iron Chef. . .

DT:

Yep, absolutely.

SM:

. . . and I used to go to Morimoto’s restaurant next door. And I I'd have this thing where he'd feed me himself from this he'd get a pot of the, the dumplings and he'd feed me while I was talking to him. And I used to love that. He's an exceptional guy, really was, well still is an exceptional guy.

Now but you did have the other side of things. You went to CIA, your mentors and your idols and, and those people as well came from France and came from Italy and came from Spain and all of those. So, did that fit in and who are these mentors from the other side? The kind of not the safe side because I have Bocuse who I went to see and all these wonderful things. And they're not safe, they're just doing it very differently. So, what kind of mentors did you have from the other side?

DT:

Oh man, as you grow up, you're going in CIA, you can't help and you're classically, I was an 18 year old kid, the next person youngest to me was seven years older than me. So, I came in. . .

SM:

Wow.

DT:

. . . wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, never leaving home. And you. . .

SM:

Ha ha.

DT:

. . . start learning about French food and you start digging into it and you start looking at people like, and I don't know, for me it's Ducasse, Alain Passard, Pierre Gagné, you look at these guys and you're just like, this is the Rue brothers. When you start digging into that, Marco, Marco Pierre White, you start digging into that. White Heat, that book was. . .

SM:

I'm actually here's the thing. I was involved in publishing and one of my colleagues at a different publisher at this time was the person who published White Heat. And Marco Pierre and I went to his restaurant, Harvey's, when it opened, and a few times, and he was great. My trouble with him is his food lacked heart. It had he had great food, it was amazing. . .

DT:

Technique.

SM:

. . . but there was no heart to it. He did everything perfectly, but I couldn't see it. And that was me. But yeah. But. . .

DT:

Yeah,  but and I think, as a young culinary, you look at those and I think, and I think it's true as a trades, as someone who's learning a trade, right, you have to look at these technicians first, before you can. . .

SM:

Yeah. yeah.

DT:

. . . create your own personality. So, people like him, on the American side, who could I'm from Chicago. So, Charlie, Charlie Trotter was the A number one, it was, you think about nobody was. . .

SM:

Was, yeah. And his restaurant was phenomenal.

DT:

. . .doing what Charlie did, nobody was doing and even to this generation. I think some people forget, go back to his book, his, go back to his books. They were so, they were so revolutionary in the idea that I am going to make a dish and I'm going to tell you what farm I came, it came from. I'm going to tell you. . . .

SM:

Yeah. I went to his restaurants a couple of times and everything was so special and as someone who's both what's the word? Critic and a chef hopefully now and they come together and you're just saying that's some it comes from a brain that I don't understand, but it's amazing.

DT:

Fabulous. And it's people like, who was the chef at Stars back in the day in San Francisco? My God, he was it.

SM:

Jeremy, he, he's on my Facebook page. I can't remember his name now. But he was just Jonathan Waxman is still with us and his food is just you look at it when he's doing and his even now his brain is like amazing and I still go and it. . .

DT:

It's so, it was, it's so relevant that, that, for us, it's normal now to say, Hey, this is Santa Barbara spot prawns. We never said that before.

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

This might be, it's before my era, but you didn't, you just caught it in the spot prawn. Now you're saying where you got it from, like the quail that comes in LA that everyone uses, like the wolf, I think it's wolf ranch quail. Like no one, it's normal for us to say that now, but before we never said that. And my old chef, I don't know you've ever been to her restaurants, Carrie Nahabedian.

SM:

No, I haven't.

DT:

She had a restaurant called NAHA and she has a restaurant. . .

SM:

Okay.

DT:

. . . in Chicago called Brindille. She was Charlie's first chef at a restaurant called St. Clair's in Lake Forest. And it was just like, I never, especially as a kid, I'm Asian American, I never, worked. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . in her kitchens and you got a dish and it literally has 45 words to describe, cause she's telling people. This is the ranch where the quail came from. This is the, she has goat cheese in it. So, she's telling you Capri oil farms in Indiana goat cheese, the turnips came from this farm and whatever. That was so it wasn't we didn't say that before. Now I think like, I look up to those people because now that's how I cook on top of I influence from, trying these local farmers as much as possible, but also putting my spin on Asian food.

SM:

That's it's just wonderful. I just love that. But I know so here it it didn't hinder your cooking at all. But what about your type of cooking working say with a brigade system? If you've gone and worked in a brigade which you have, which apparently came from Escoffier working in a Prussian brigade when he was in the military and he saw the brigade working that doing the military stuff and he thought that would be a good idea, which I think is fantastic. Anyway, how did you find that? The brigade system, did that not work badly with your type of cooking or was it just something you could. . .

DT:

No, I think you have to understand how restaurants work and how a kitchen works. And once you understand that, then it all makes sense. I say this with the utmost respect and understanding our sense of time right now. And listen, did I have pots thrown at me when I was younger? Yes. Did people scream at me incessantly? Yes. Did I break down in tears? Know this. Yes. And listen, I won't say that. . . . It's not a good thing, but it made me who I am now. As an. . .

SM:

Yeah, I understand.

DT:

. . . 18 and 19 year old kid, I needed that structure. And I say this to lot of my chefs and I say, guys, this is not, we are here to teach and we're here to do food and food's not that serious. I understand it's my life's work, but we're not gonna yell. We wanna teach, we wanna uplift people. We wanna make this an environment where people wanna work at and stay here. But you all need to understand that when you walk through these doors in this entire restaurant, this is Daleistan. This is the Republic of Dale. This is not a democracy here, guys. And it can't. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . work like that. There has to be one vision. There can be many voices on how to manage that, but there has to be one vision or else what we're doing already that is confusing to people and it's not the normal. Gets even more confusing when there's multiple voices trying to dictate what it is that we're offering guests. Now how we manage a team, completely different guys. There needs to be more voices in the room and I think that's why everyone got in trouble with it because there weren't enough voices in the room, whether they're women, gay, straight, whatever, those voices, black, people of color, those voices need to be needed to be louder in the ecosystem of kitchens, right? Because for the majority of time, it was straight white men and usually from Europe who were telling you how to do things. And it ain't that world anymore. But when it comes to vision and execution of the vision, it can be one and there has to be one voice. And I think that sometimes that's where we get confused with, everyone has to have a voice at the table. Yeah, when it comes to managing the team. But when it comes to the concept of what this is, especially people like myself who work creating food that it's some, like you just said, no one's ever heard of the scallion crab, scallion pancake Rangoon. No one's heard of that. So, we have to be. . . .

SM:

Tell me a, tell me about that. So, how do you work out a recipe and let's talk about the scallion pancake? Because you're the one who's coming up with it. You're the one who decides predominantly how it's plated, you're the one who's decides what's inside it. And how do you get well first of all, how do you get that over to your sous chef and your line cooks and because they're not necessarily if you're not there they're not gonna create it as well as you because they're not. And how do you get that over to them to be able to serve? So, I'd love to know that.

DT:

First of all, it starts with a team, right? You need a great team. And we have one at Goosefeather that's phenomenal. My executive chef, Jeremy, Jeremiah, was we, I had introduced these scallion pancakes, these roti paratha, the. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . .frozen ones that you get, right? Because obviously, like, everybody wants a homemade one. It's just not. And when you're doing 400 covers, it's just not. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . possible to do a to a la minute. So, I introduced it to him and we started having conversations and we started, wiggled our way down to this path and I said, I want, I would love to have something. I would love to have a dish that involved the scallion pancake as the main event. So, he, we talked, he came up, he said, chef, I have this idea for a crab Rangoon. I was like, I love crab Rangoon. That's one of my favorite things at Chinese American restaurants. He's like, great.

SM:

Where did, where did 'cause Crab Rangoon never really came over to Britain? And so where did that come from in the before you you told me more about the dishes? Where did that come from?

DT:

I mean, it has to, that's when you call Chinese American, when people say Chinese food and they're actually talking. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . about Chinese American food, that's what that is. And, I have a dip. I was introduced to this imitation crab dip that my aunt made who actually went to culinary school. She worked for United in the food service end of it. And she was never really a chef, right? She just kind of worked in the food industry, but she would make this crab dip with cream cheese, little onion, some chopped celery, imitation crab, called it a day. And I loved it. Ritz crackers, you put Ritz crackers, was like, this is amazing. So, I would start eatin, this, I knew what was in Crab Rangoon. When I first moved to New York and you're just like, what's the real New York Chinese American experience? In my mind, it's Seinfeld, where you're on a couch and you're sharing quart containers of fried rice, pork lo mein, egg roll. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . Crab Rangoons, dumplings. So that's how well my order was put together and how we just find these Crab Rangoons. And I think there's something magical when you put a crispy shell with something cream cheese filled inside of it. There's some magic that happens with that. It's trashy. . .

SM:

It's great It's great.

DT:

. . . in the best possible way. So, we were trying to find the soul of that dish, but make it ours. So, he created this and he created this, this Rangoon presented to me and I was like, you know what this needs? It needs that crazy gloopy sauce that they always put it with. That's definitely like ketchup and orange juice and has red number five in it. So, we, I was like, Hey, take sweet chili sauce, reduce it down and then drizzle it like almost caramelized sweet chili sauce. Almost burn it. And we drizzled that on top and it was like, boom, that was a dish. I said, dude, don't touch this. This is absolutely wonderful. And when it, I'll say this, is that it's one thing to be able to present a dish to somebody and it be delicious. It's another thing to replicate it 50 times in a night. My team there, especially the chef, Jeremiah, was able to reverse engineer that because I was like, okay, well, how do we now keep this crisp? How do we get it crispy? How do get it hot? How do you make sure that? And he nailed it. So, I think it starts with an idea of, hey, I want, for instance, I love. . .

SM:

Mm.

DT:

. . . Mooshoo. I love Mooshoo. Like the dish Mooshoo. So how do we take that and go into fall with a Mooshoo dish? And I said to chef, I go, I'd like a braise. So, I'd like lamb shank. And I'd like for us to do this in a Mooshoo style. So instead of stir frying it in the whole thing, it's like, hey, there's an element of stir fry, the vegetables that we're putting with this. But it's a braised lamb shank down. And we're pulling the lamb off this, putting these crispy, crunchy, stir-fried vegetables into a perfectly steamed Mooshoo, a little bit of mustard because mustard and lamb are like the best, and then in your mouth. So, I think that's where it starts. It starts with the idea, like, where do we want to go with Mooshoo? And what do we love about fall?

SM:

Oh. This is just even the way you describe it is so great. Oh. and I hear about this now when I'm talking to Korean chefs, first generation and they're talking about corn cheese. We've never corn all in Korea, but you have that now and it's just so tasty and it's so fantastic and it's well. . .

But what I tell you one thing and I wanted to know. What's your view of MSG, which I will say I love, and I always have packets of it and I use it on anything. I'll even use it in I cook a lot of Bengali food and that's where I love and dishes from around India, but again from that's where I come from. But or part of me comes from. But what did you think of MSG?

DT:

And I'll say this and I don't know if I'll get hammered for it, but as a chef, as a chef, and I think a chef like in my style of food and what I do, I am in search of delicious.

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

That's it. That is it. I'm in search of what is going to be the best tasting for you. If you're worried about MSG, but you're going to sit there and drink half a bottle of Macallan, what do you think that Macallan's doing to you?

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

Don't worry about the MSG because I promise you that bottle of McCallan's doing worse for your body than that MSG. So, I'm not here, I'm not opening up a health food store for hopefully you can get all your macros in and that's not me. I'm here solely for the idea that when you eat at my restaurant, I'm gonna produce you hopefully delicious food. And how I get from A to B, I will take, it's like by any means necessary. I am like the Black Panthers when it comes to that. By any means necessary, I'm going to get from point A to point B. And if that is, if I'm using, if I'm stir frying food in bacon fat, my fried rice is getting stir fried in bacon fat and you're like, this tastes delicious. Why?

SM:

Gold. Yeah.

DT:

It's like, well, we started off with four tablespoons of bacon fat and built it from there, we have a sausage, egg, and cheese fried rice at the menu for brunch. That is a riff on, of course, a sausage, egg, and cheese on a roll here in New York City. What we're doing with fried rice. People are like, this is so good. And it's so filling. I'm like, oh great. You do know it starts off with like four eggs and four slices of American cheese. And we make a basically American cheese omelet and start a stir fry with that. And you could see their face go, oh I wish you didn't tell me that. It's like, yeah, but it was good, right? They're like, it's absolutely delicious. I'm like, it's not my job to control your cholesterol. It is not.

SM:

No, I absolutely. Absolutely. Now I want to chat to you about, going back to your Filipino times and maybe we could both swap the Filipino dishes that we like. So just five of them, if you have anything that you could get for five dishes and I'll name five that I just get. So, you what. . .

DT:

Sure. My king of Filipino dishes, my number one is Kare-Kare. I'm an oxtail guy. I will eat oxtails with shrimp paste. It is, to me, it is one of my, it reminds me of Christmas, because my aunt used to make that. Not my mom, my aunt. There is a traditional dish that my mom makes in Christmas called pancit molo. It's actually wonton. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . soup. Shrimp.

SM:

That's fantastic.

DT:

And my mom uses chicken for some reason because I think she's trying to control its cholesterol but like normally like pork dumplings and I love it. It's a rich broth. You take the shrimp shells. Nothing goes to waste. There is a dish. . .

SM:

That's two.

DT:

. . . very unique. It's very unique to my mom's region. It's called KBL. KBL. It's Kadyos Baboy Langka. It means, Kadyos is a black bean, Baboy is the pig or pig's trotters, and Langka is jackfruit. So, it's basically black beans. It's Filipino style black beans, but they've soured, like every Filipino have soured it. So, it's like a, it's almost like adobo.

SM:

Yep. My gosh. That sound fantastic.

DT:

And you eat it with, obviously you eat it with rice, but it is one of my mom's, it's one of my favorites. Cause it's so unique also. To. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . .get the beans, it's very hard. So that's three, right?

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

I love, I'm a sinigang, think it's not, it's what you got to put it up there. Sinigang is...

SM:

There's a place in Manila that brings you out a row of the soups so you can decide how sour you like it and I always go for the most sour and it's just glorious. Oh. Okay. So, you want to put have sinigang?

DT:

Sinigang, yeah, there, and that's four, right? And then my last. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

One, I love Tinola, the chicken soup with. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . .it's a chicken soup, lemongrass, tons of ginger, and a leaf, it's kind of funky leaf that, it's very, it's pepper leaves, pepper leaves. . .

SM:

Okay.

DT:

. . . and green papaya. So, pepper leaves like actual, bell peppers or spicy peppers, if you grab the leaves, they have a very distinct almost bitterness to them that adds so much to the soup that I love.

SM:

Oh. That sounds so fantastic. Mine. . .

DT:

Yes.

SM:

I love Munggo. The Munggo with a little bit of the horseradish leaf in there and this is something that my wife always makes for me if I'm ever feeling unwell. And it's and I have it with her we get into arguments about her type of rice and my type of rice, mine. . .

DT:

Ha ha ha.

SM:

. . . is basmati and it's the grains shouldn't stick together and the and hers is obviously the rice that sticks together. But she makes me that and I'm sitting in bed when I'm feeling ill and that is just so fantastic. So, Munggo.

Bagnet I don't know if you know what bagnet is. It's it's like pork belly that's fried and that's from Ilocos. And it's just it's so it's fr it's boiled, fried, and served with a little bit of sauce and that is just and they serve it in markets. You can go and buy a little bag of it and eat these pork cracklings, which is not very good for me, but. . .

DT:

Oh yes, yes.

SM:

. . . it's just exceptional.

I wanted to mention Kare-Kare because I wanted to I went to San Diego the other day and there was this lady there who worked for Brian Malarkey. Well she does work for Brian Malarkey and she’s put, a Filipino lady. Yeah, of course.

DT:

Tara. Tara.

SM:

And she's done this Kare-Kare with beef there, but it's so delicious and it just made me and the peanut sauce of course and all of this and it just made me. . . My mother's go not what's the one that makes me feel all ho the one with bile not good. That's the only. . .

DT:

Yeah.

SM:

dish I've not tried too much because it but she always has this goat Kilawin. And. . .

DT:

Mmm.

SM:

. . . that was just so delicious. And the third one, I have to say I'm going to the sweet, the Ensaymada.

DT:

Yeah.

SM:

And so, I mean, and you could just go on and on and on. But I want to say just on this area, thank you. That has been so much fun. And you're knowing where you come from and where you've been, and from France, and to all these places, I just think it's an amazing conversation.

But I'm now gonna ask you three questions that I like I said, I ask everybody. Now, if Dale was a meal what would it be?

DT:

If it was me, I would be a whole roasted lobe of foie gras.

SM:

Oh. Whoa.

DT:

I feel like I'm not, feel like Dale isn't for everybody, but for the ones that love him, absolutely love it. And there is such a thing as too much foie gras and there's such a thing as too much Dale.

Ha ha ha.

SM:

Ha ha ha.

We, we, we love my wife and I absolutely love foie gras, but we can't get it in LA. . .

DT:

Yeah, it's hard. That's our luck.

SM:

. . . in, in California they won't allow it and I'm going What? But anyway and yet they allow, stuff to be slaughtered in such horrible ways and all of that.

Okay. If Dale had to go back in time to any meal, where would that be? And what would you have?

DT:

I'll throw a controversial one out there. So, I would sit at the table at, Jesus and his apostles. I want to be at that meal because I know Jesus was a Jew and he doesn't eat pork, but I'd be like, hey, you got to try mine. I'll. . .

SM:

Ha ha ha.

DT:

. . . flip you on it, man. I know you don't need it, but...

DT:

Trust me, Jesus, I got you. It's gonna be really good. Watch out for that guy at the corner over there. He's I don't know, he's a good.

SM:

You don't you just have to bear in mind I you know, I studied theology. That was one of my how I started and I was gonna be an Anglican priest and so we had to do all this stuff and the thing they used to say was that the pigs in Jewish times they kept them outside the city because they were. . . they ate all the rubbish. So that's the only reason. So, you have to get a good clean pig, I think. But anyway, I would. . .

DT:

Absolutely, absolutely.

SM:

Okay, now, if Dale had to go back in time to see the invention of anything, what would it be?

DT:

I, for me it's pretty easy because I use it in my restaurants every day, the first gas-powered wok. . .

SM:

That's fantastic.

DT:

. . . to see the person that was like, hey, we're going to generate 280,000 BTU out of this. You're cooking in a wok. Woks have been around forever. You're doing it over fire and it's a concentrated hole.

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

They're literally pumping. I was in Malaysia when I see street carts with guys making noodles with, charcoal fired woks and going, this is hard work. I just could you imagine being in the room when that guy fired that thing up and everyone the light bulb went off in everyone's heads like oh my god we can do this without killing ourselves every single. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . day. I'm getting more in some respects you have to look at it you're getting more firepower out of that than they ever were and they almost recreated a cuisine because. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . of the ability to get wak-he so quickly as opposed to let it fire it up, make sure it stays hot when you're firing this up. You're able to produce that in the flick of a lever. It's crazy. And people who don't know. . .

SM:

That's a great. . .

DT:

. . . yeah, people who don't know have never cooked on a wok. It's a different experience. I mean. . .

SM:

Yeah.

DT:

. . . it is hot and fast, and you better have everything ready to go, because it's going to go quick.

SM:

Yeah, and I try to recreate it here on my little stove and trust me, that is a fantastic answer. And interesting enough, last weekend we went to a Malaysian restaurant here and they really did it. And the food was really, really, really good and I loved it. We we've been to Malaysia quite a few times and I just love it. So that is fantastic. And the fact that we ate it this weekend makes it even more special.

Just before you go, what are your social media sites here? So, people can follow you and see what you do. And from what we're doing now, I think people really want to follow you because you're talking about food in such a wonderful way. Please tell me what are your social media sites and what your name is.

DT:

Yeah, I'm sure I'm primarily on Instagram. So, @ Dale Talde, it's my name. The restaurants follow us a@ Food Crush Hospitality. It's the hospitality group underneath that we have Goosefeather NY on Instagram. And we have, I have a restaurant in LaGuardia called Talde Noodle Bar. And I'm also. . .

SM:

Okay.

DT:

. . . a part of a restaurant in Naples, Florida called Tigress and Easy Tiger. Easy tiger is the bar. Tigress is the restaurant. And that's both in the Perry Hotel, the Perry Hotel Naples. So, catch me at any one of those. And if you're in any of those places, stop in for a bite.

SM:

Fantastic. This is so great, Dale. This was so special and I love sharing all those thoughts and because I come from a similar type of background, it makes me feel the same way. So, thank you very much. Thank you.

DT:

Cheers, Simon. Thank you so much for having me.

OUTRO MUSIC

SM:

Make sure to check out the website associated with this podcast at www.EatMyGlobe.com where we’ll be posting the transcripts from each episode, along with all the references and resources we used putting the episodes together, in case you want to delve deeper into each subject. There is also a contact button, so please do let us know if there are any subjects that you would like us to cover.

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Thank you and goodbye from me, Simon Majumdar, and we’ll speak to you soon on the next episode of EAT MY GLOBE: Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know About Food.

CREDITS

The EAT MY GLOBE Podcast is a production of “It’s Not Much But It’s Ours” and “Producer Girl Productions.”

We would also like to thank Sybil Villanueva for all of her help both with the editing of the transcripts and her essential help with the research.