Yet there is an intense desire among the best chefs to be profound right now. Not only are they supposed to be the best chefs, they’re expected to be big-picture icons who change the world. On one extreme, Michael Stadtländer is operating an integrated farm and restaurant in the woods of Ontario—a highly symbolic, gauntlet-throwing project, but at eight-odd diners a night, not especially significant in the grand scheme of how North Americans dine out. On the other extreme, Adrià, who has been called the most imaginative chef in history, recently spent eight months working on a french-fry recipe, the basis for a new fast-food chain intended to recalibrate the way Spanish culture eats, emphasizing flavour, nutrition, value, even wonder.
Right now Noble is closer to the Adrià end of the spectrum. When Earls hired him, he was told two things: Our mission from now on is “to become world famous.” Your job is to create “addictive flavours.” In return, Noble would get reach.
As a member of Canada’s gold-medal-winning team at the 1996 Culinary Olympics in Berlin, as two-time representative at the Bocuse d’Or World Cuisine Contest, and as the only Canadian to compete on the original Iron Chef, Noble has taken his food to scarier juries than Earls’ Executive Tasting Panel. And because he has confronted these juries, because his genius has been hailed in magazines from Gourmet to GQ, because professional chefs talk about him reverently, your fingers might handle the pages of a menu—an Earls menu—with anticipation. Which ones are his But these lifelong operators, who have built an empire on maximizing resources other kitchens haven’t the faintest idea what to do with, still haven’t quite figured this out: how do you harness mystique
To signal Earls’ new direction, their six regional chefs were flown to Vegas, where they dined at Joël Robuchon’s third L’Atelier restaurant (the other two are in Tokyo and Paris). The first thing they ate was chilled avocado foam set atop a brilliant layer of red. “You had to go through the green to get to the mixture below,” Noble says. “It was almost like high-end guacamole and salsa. Still his food. Just more approachable. But still deep.”
When Noble talks about other chefs, he takes on the aura of a character in a Jeunet film—reflective and serene, as though in touch with something very small about the universe’s underlying chemistry. His face is thin and long, as is his body save for his broad shoulders, which can lend his arms and hands the illusion of floating. “I was having dinner there,” he says of L’Atelier, “not because I wanted to dig into the soul of Robuchon, I just wanted to enjoy the food. And then for ten seconds I wondered what he put in there. But then in another ten seconds I wanted another spoonful.” Noble pauses and the hand/shoulder illusion halts. “It sounds egoistic, but I like to think he could have come to one of the great restaurants I worked at and said, “How did he do that’”
Later, we talk about how to codify what, deep down, Noble seems to equate with magic. “Some of the greatest food I’ve ever had in my life you can’t put your finger on it. You can’t go back and recreate it in the kitchen. Cooking’s very personal. There’s no cooking ever done by the book.” But the book is tk1’s raison d’être. Earls puts its finger on it. They rearrange the steps so it can be done by the book. Then they fine-tune the book so that every hapless set of hands at every kitchen in the empire will move as if attached to Noble’s shoulders.
Noble works on a lime-green chopping board, cutting and weighing. He fills small baggies and large deli containers with sauces, marinades, pre-packaged chipotle, and cubed ciabatta, dropping near-exact portions on an Accu-Weigh digital scale, tinkering as he goes. Cutting, weighing. Less oil so the chipotle will stick to the pork chop. He works quickly, but whenever he starts to get into a rhythm, the phone rings or a delivery arrives or he must dash out to the main kitchen for a portion of Alfredo. He makes more than twenty-five trips over the course of the morning, excusing himself each time. “Damn, I brought too much,” he says and runs out to return some pre-peeled roasted garlic. Several times, he states he is not used to cooking this way. He glares at a red onion that isn’t up to his standards, then taunts it: “Badass—big, thick, clunky.”
Each recipe in Noble’s blue binder has a title at the top, followed by directions for “finesse.” The finesse for Indonesian Pizza (which will later be renamed Thai Chicken Pizza) reads: “homely natural looking pizza with slightly non-uniform perimeter.” Ingredients and portions are next: “pizza dough,” “Thai peanut sauce,” “nacho cheese portion,” “Indo chicken,” “red onions,” “red peppers,” “roasted pineapple,” “hot banana peppers,” “garnish with a handful of cold Asian salad.” Every element of prep required to assemble this pizza is already required for an existing Earls dish. The aim is not only to leverage the finite range of techniques each kitchen’s line has been rigorously drilled to execute, but also to incorporate every last portion container of nacho cheese and Indo chicken in the joint.
Earls functions not unlike a mirror ball in that it synthesizes cutting-edge trends from around the world and reflects them back in a vernacular of softened angles and flirty girls. When the people who run Earls talk about their “concept,” they inevitably say Yes, but will it fly in Flin Flon There is no Earls in Flin Flon. Not yet. Flin Flon is the great hypothetical test market, shorthand for the question: Can we pump out the exact same bento box we do in Burnaby And more to the point, will Flin Floners buy that bento box if we can
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