Former Top Chef Contestant Dale Talde Just Wants to Straight-Up Eat at Du Jour Bakery

A lot of time has passed since Dale Talde was seen as the combative cook with something to prove on Top Chef on the Bravo network. “I was twenty-eight,” he says. “I’m thirty-six now and fifty pounds heavier.” His management style has also changed. “Communicating is more effective than just screaming at people and expecting them to know what you are talking about,” he says. “At some point you grow up.”

Dale has grown up alongside TJ and Vera Obias, chefs and owners of Du Jour Bakery in Park Slope. Dale worked with them at prestigious New York restaurants: Morimoto with TJ and Buddakan with Vera. He’s seen their true mom-and-pop shop open three years ago and become, as he says, “crazy busy.” Nowadays, Dale buys pastries for his restaurant from TJ and Vera, so Dale’s here picking up pastries, stopping for coffee, and saying hi at least twice a week. His connection with the owners goes even deeper, as he’s known Vera for thirteen years and TJ for ten. He introduced them, he says, and when they got married at the courthouse, Dale was their witness.

Now it’s their turn to be part of his nuptials. As we talk in Du Jour Bakery’s plain but peaceful backyard, Dale says he has an engagement party in Chicago coming up and then the big wedding in October, and TJ and Vera will be providing a most critical piece: their unbeatable Brooklyn blackout cake. Beyond the upcoming wedding, Dale has a whole lot going on; he owns six (yes, six!) restaurants—three in Brooklyn (including Talde, just a few blocks away), two in Jersey City, one coming in Miami, and even a seventh on its way; he’s readying the release of a cookbook he coauthored called Asian-American about “the food that we do from my culture of being a first-generation Asian in America”; and as we talk, he’s even got two producers waiting just a table away to pitch him a new TV show idea. I do my best to ignore them and focus on the matters at hand: Dale’s refreshingly frank and brusque perspectives on making it in New York and all this crazy delicious food. Du Jour Bakery is more than pastries, though they are all masterfully handmade (like the brioche bread pudding with salted caramel sauce . . . dang!). The bakery also features real meals, like their deceptively simple tuna melt with its secret ingredient: family history.

I can guarantee you that tuna melt is the way TJ’s family used to eat tuna salad. That’s not a new recipe. You can taste that’s how they made tuna salad. What you can tell is the care. There’s the same care in the food as if a family member was making it.

It’s a tuna melt—nothing pretentious about it. He uses a ton of mayo, which I love, and the bread is super crunchy. The cheese is properly melted. It’s seasoned properly.

Chefs a lot of the time want to do their take on something, or they want to get creative. Sometimes I don’t want creative. Sometimes I just want a sandwich.

This is a dying breed of a true mom-and-pop.

I chose this place because who makes their own pastry? They laminate their own dough in the basement. Not easy.

When I was a young kid, I wanted to be avant-garde and do shit that no one had seen before. I got older and started to hate stupid combinations of food that people were putting together to be fancy. I did not like pretentious, precious food. I just wanted to straight-up eat. I just wanted to have dinner.

Back here you can get away from the world. I can sit and talk with friends. You get away from the world and talk about business, and you realize you are not alone in the world.

This is a dying breed of a true mom-and-pop. It’s family owned and run: for the neighborhood and in the neighborhood. They don’t take on too much. They make pastries and ask us to pick them up. They don’t have a delivery guy. It doesn’t get any cooler than that.

I could pound pastries like a fat kid. It’s not hard when they taste like this.

You come to New York and are a bit naive to the way the world is. You come here and say shit is real, and you grind. You have to survive here.

In restaurants, you don’t ever have to grow up. If you want to act like you’re twenty-two until you’re old, you can do that. You can get fucked up until 5 a.m. and then roll in at noon, if that’s how you want to live. I didn’t want to live my life that way. I changed my behavior. Saying I’m massively hungover on a Tuesday because I was at Saint Marks at the yakitori place—that gets old.

They are going to do the wedding cake. They do a Brooklyn blackout cake. It’s the best you’ve ever had in your life. Try others. Theirs will beat everyone else’s chocolate cake.

Saying I’m massively hungover on a Tuesday gets old.

It means more when a friend does that for you. You could have others do it, but why? You want them to do it because you love them.

After the first year we both opened, we were sitting in the basement and talking. For a year they didn’t take a day off. I went two months, and then I took a day off, and then we opened another restaurant six months later. It was a grind. I was talking about that specifically—about how hard it was. It was tough on both of us. All of us. We had a minute to breathe, and they were busting out a birthday cake, and we were shooting the shit about it. It was hard.

I won’t let my success and failure define who I am.

I would love to be recognized for being a great chef and creating good restaurants. But your friends are your friends. Your peers are your peers. You only have friends and family when it’s all said and done. Peers don’t care about your brother and the stuff he goes through. I care because it’s important to me.

The friendship I have with the owners. The love I have for their craft and what they do. I mean just the bond we created through the years makes me a regular. I am the same way. I am intensely passionate about what I do, but I don’t take myself too seriously. These guys are the same way. There’s a bond. You go through the trenches together.

May 22, 2015