For Geoffrey Zakarian, Breakfast Is The Best Time To Connect With Your Heritage - Exclusive Interview

We at Tasting Table are curious: What can attendees look forward to from you at the upcoming L.A. Wine & Food Festival?

Well, it's new. This is a whole new world, L.A. Food Festival. It sounds completely ridiculous that it should be new, because L.A. is such a fantastic food world, but it's sort of a new look for us. We do a lot of food fests ... I know what people like. But I also know that stuff that I like that is maybe a touch more esoteric or fun that I think people will appreciate. And I try to do it in a classical sense always, I always try to have one foot very much in the past.

And so I was wondering ... First of all, I don't know what the weather's going to be in LA. I know it's kind of not very good right now, but usually, it's pretty nice. So I'm figuring it'll be in the 60s or 70s, and since we're going to be outside on the pier, I decided to do fish. How about that? Radical.

Any particular insight into what type of seafood you're going to be using or how you're going to be using it?

Probably a bluefin tuna from the Akami. And I want to put maybe an Italian spin on it. I'm not quite 100% sure what the finished product's going to be, but when we get there, we'll see. It always depends on when you do these things, what the setup is, and what you can do outside. And there's so many people, there's so many moving parts, it's like opening a pop-up for two hours. I plan for the best, but I plan for the worst also. I'm going to put an Italian sort of condiment spin on it. It's not going to be a tartar. And I might use some caviar just because caviar is seemingly making a comeback.

Isn't it?

Seems to be. It was luxury, and oh my god, poo-poo, and now it's like, "Oh, caviar with toast and eggs." It's become okay because now there are very many offshoots; since they banned some caviars, a lot of other caviars have come by that aren't so expensive and so dear. They're excellent. So that's what I'm thinking.

We have some great chefs going. You saw the lineup. It's also great. I've contacted Antonia [Lofaso], and I'm like, "Please tell me where to go for dinner." I don't know anyone. It's just so much, it's like chock full of choices. She's going to give me a list of where to go.

How about Armenian dishes? Let's say you're cooking at home. Do you have any particular dishes from the cuisine, tips, and tricks that you could recommend for preparing them?

We do eat a lot of rice. Instead of cooking it in a casserole like my mom used to cook it, we cook it in a rice cooker, a Japanese rice cooker. And so we always try to do that. And when you flavor rice, it's really interesting. So we try to flavor it with fresh bay leaves and things like that. I use a lot of lamb here, but I still love lamb.

And we eat ground lamb for breakfast. We grind the lamb with some onions, we sweat it in a lot of butter, and then we add cinnamon and pine nuts and we do a nice flatbread on the side and scrambled eggs. And so you just put the eggs, the ground lamb that's buttery and brown and cinnamony, and pine nuts as sort of like a crumble. Just dip the eggs on your pita or flatbread and you put the lamb on top and eat that for breakfast. It's like an Armenian taco tapas. It's so delicious, and no one puts together cinnamon and pine nuts and lamb, but that sort of really embodies what Middle Eastern cuisine is. It's very simple, but it's incredibly fragrant.

So a lot of coriander, a lot of cinnamon, a lot of star anise. It has roots or parallels to almost Vietnamese flavorings, but it goes deep into butter and lamb and eggplant, tomato, a lot of rice dishes, and a lot of lamb and beef that's dried. We're very deep in flavor and warm spices. And it's sort of a cuisine that's very inexpensive for the most part, but that's sort of what we concentrate on in this particular house. I have a lot of flavor profiles. I have three young kids, so we're all over the place. It's not just one sort of flavor profile.

Thanks for sharing that. Now my mouth is watering.

The breakfast is delicious, and my kids go nuts when I have it. My kids' favorite breakfast is olive tapenade, which I make. I get grilled French bread on a planchette that I bake in the morning from frozen. And I put out slices of prosciutto, provolone, tapenade, fresh bowl of arugula, and they make their own sandwich in the morning, and they grab that, and they get in the car, and we take them to school. Who would've thought that it would be like that, but it's perfect. You have protein; you have olives, anchovies, and capers. You have good fermented stuff, nice French bread, you have beautiful greens, and you have great fat and protein. I mean, that's what your brain needs as a human being in the morning.

A more serious question: As such a prominent figure in the New York dining scene, I'm curious to know how you feel about the city's foodscape approaching four years post-pandemic.

I'm there all the time because I film there. At least in New York, I have many points of light, so I'm never at a loss where to go. It seems quite vibrant to me. There's been a shuffling. It's like musical chairs, and not in a bad sense.

You get to a point where you're so saturated with restaurants, which New York was in 2018. You are going to get to a point where there is a supply of people who want to work in the food industry versus the expense, which is rising very rapidly, versus the amount of people that can afford it. You have a changing landscape of more fast casual, less formal, and fewer overall restaurants. 

What's happened in New York is that office space has diminished. It's a devastating number for lunch and for catering and for after-parties. You've lost, I don't know the number, I'll say close to 5,000 restaurants. 

What's happened is you have had sort of this fallback with fewer restaurants. Food and drink are very expensive now. I don't know the last time you've been in New York City, but it's really gone up to a large level. You have people that are doing very well, like the Daniel Boulud Group, Jean-Georges Group, and a few others that have established themselves and have very good leases because they've been in the city for a long time. When people want something, and they can depend on someone, you have [restaurateurs] that can have a specialty restaurant, and [customers] are around once in a while, and it's fun to go for a special occasion. Now people say, "Okay, they've been around 30 years; let's just go there."

That's what they call a default restaurant. The people I mentioned are great restaurateurs, but they're also great default restaurants. If you can't find a place to go and you can't get into ZiZi, or you can't get into whatever the new places are downtown, can't get into Jody Williams', Jean-Georges is close by, just go there. Let's go to JoJo. Or let's go to The Cafe.

That's what's happened. It's like the more specialized [restaurateurs] have gotten bigger and a wider array of restaurants, but there's definitely been a shrinkage in the industry as a whole. I don't know the feeling, but I do ask questions when I'm there, and they do tell me the landscape is so difficult now as far as expense-wise. Yet it's thriving as always. Places like Le Bernardin have never been busier in their livelihood. You have this extreme of business and this quality that's still, to me, the best in the country. 

Some underrated pantry staples that you think home chefs should always keep on hand?

That's a fun question. I'll tell you stuff that I think everybody should have; I just mentioned it: tapenade. Whether you buy it or make it, you should have a tapenade. You should have pickled onions. You should have a sambal oelek, like a beautiful spicy chili sauce. You should have miso paste, Pommery mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco sauce.

Those are sort of wet and cold pantry items. Then, on the dry side, cinnamon, star anise, whole cardamom, and whole cloves. I'll give you canned anchovies and canned Portuguese tuna.

How about non-negotiable ingredients that mixologists should include within their bar?

Non-negotiables? Well, I'll go on the non-booze side. You've got to have a couple of beautiful bitters. You should have two or three kinds of simple syrup, maybe a honey simple syrup and a regular simple syrup. Those are real backbones. Definitely three or four Amaros so you can make some beautiful Amaro cocktails and bitters, Italian Amaros.

Then I go for real good London dry gins, two or three, not too many. I'm not into a lot of the new gins because they're often flavored. It's fun to have a couple of bottles of fun-looking gin, Gunpowder gin, and those kinds that are sort of quite good. Hendrick's, it's fun to look at that bottle, but it tastes like cucumbers. I'm a Plymouth gin drinker. I think Plymouth and Beefeater are two really good London dry gins. Two vodkas, a whiskey, a bourbon, a Japanese scotch, a scotch from Islay.

And then, I mean, it's up to you what you want to add to that. Definitely really good vermouth, a red vermouth, a white vermouth, Noilly Prat. Some Castelvetrano olives and some fantastic cherries in brandy. And you basically have a bar that pretty much will suit anyone. Some nice Fever-Tree products, mixers, soda, tonic, ginger, quinine.

A bar is relatively simple. It's the thing when you get all this esoteric stuff, most people don't have room for all this stuff, right? So you really have to understand, "Okay, well, what is it that I'm going to be good at?" You should be good at an Aperol spritz, you should be good at a Manhattan, you should be good at a nice whiskey sour, and you should be good at a martini. If you get those, anybody can make a margarita, anybody can have vodka and tonic, gin and tonic, but you want to be good at those four. And those four things I just mentioned don't take a lot; it's not a heavy lift to have those on your bar.