We got our first glimpse of chefs’ refrigerators in Paris, a city whose food culture is protected by UNESCO, and the place that Adrian and I most often call home. Our day jobs (photographer-writer and head concierge at a Paris luxury hotel) as well as our after-work hours revolve around food. We each count a handful of chefs as friends, the kind who invite us over for simple dinners at home made with a few pinched items from the restaurant’s reach-ins as well as ingredients from their home fridges. It got us thinking. What happens when the restaurant shuts down for the night, the chef’s whites come off, and these culinary artists head home to grab something to eat? After we rummaged through a few fridges we knew we were on to something. And voilà! We had the makings for our first book, Inside Chefs’ Fridges, Europe.
In that first book, we wanted to get behind the persona and the cult of that particular chef and drill down to the juicier, more honest bits. And what better way to do it than to peek at the stuff they keep inside their refrigerators and to get invited to a meal made from its contents? As we made our way across Europe, we were astonished by how many ketchup bottles, industrial cheese blocks, and tomatoes we found inside various fridges. We were even more surprised to find illegal foods (delicate birds, odd varieties of mushrooms). Sometimes we found ourselves in slightly precarious situations, such as the time an empty fridge caused one chef (known for a wild temper and boozy ways) to invite us on a raucous clay pigeon shoot in the quest to feed us dinner. But the real draw of our snooping was the fascinating, wow-can-you-believe-they-have-that-in-their-fridge voyeuristic element that came with turning up exotic, or even forbidden, goods and the odd supermarket products.
Despite being longtime Parisians, we were both raised in North America, so naturally our thoughts turned to our homeland for the next book. Would the refrigerators of chefs in the Americas be larger or more luxurious than their European counterparts? Would they have smart fridges that stock only local products, or would they reveal niche goods that come from far-flung places? Would there be Weight Watchers meals, sliced cheese, marijuana, or nonorganic eggs? While we mainly focused on North American chefs, we couldn’t resist comparing their iceboxes with a few European fridges—and yes, they are indeed bigger. We would have liked to get to farther corners of the world—hopefully we will in the next book.
Our nosing around gleaned some pretty delectable truths: under those chef’s whites was almost always a personality trait not visible in the restaurant dining rooms, TV shows, or cookbook pages. We got the inside dirt on the wild ways of South American vegetable smuggling and found out who was too honest to lie at the border. We saw chefs who had hit it too big, too quickly, make life changes that caused them to stock their shelves with nonalcoholic beer and kombucha. We learned how to store grains and seeds—in a cold refrigerator. We saw chefs who flew by the seat of their pants when it turned out their assistants had forgotten to give them a heads-up that they needed to cook for us—those were some of the best meals! We came across chefs who had no idea what was in their fridge. We put our hands inadvertently on prickly pears (real and metaphorical), face creams, snuff, and homemade marijuana gummy bears, listened to what it was like to grow up in an orphanage and how it felt to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. We discussed mayonnaise (a lot!), turned down a taste of blue Kool-Aid, and listened to the merits of having three fridges.
There were definitely some overarching themes. There were condiments galore, experiments in fermentation, and different types of refrigerators—bachelor fridges, second-marriage fridges, refrigerators that had been spiffed up a little too much to be believable, and then those so sticky that we wiped them down a bit.
Almost all the chefs wanted to prepare us eggs, and when we pulled up to the table it was hard to say no; luckily for the book’s sake, we started asking them to make something else. There was so much to find out; we wanted to get insider tips on everything: how to upgrade leftover takeout rice or boring condiments, pickle anything, make hot sauce, prepare freezer hash browns, get rid of fridge odors (surprise, it’s not baking soda!), and recycle vegetable stems into kimchi.
It’s all in these pages—in close-up photographs and words, in the juxtaposition of the low-end supermarket-sourced and high-end niche products, in forgotten containers and foodstuffs pilfered from the chefs’ respective restaurants, things familiar and strange, nostalgic and chaotic, freaky and fun. In the end, we discovered, peering inside these famous chefs’ refrigerators and freezers was just another way of getting a peek into their creative minds.