The Interview: Jon Shook & Vinny Dotolo
Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo are the chefs behind the highly-acclaimed Los Angeles restaurant Animal, as well as their newly opened second restaurant in the city, Son of a Gun. Since Animal first opened, the pair have been named Best New Chefs of 2009 by Food & Wine Magazine, and were featured in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
But before they were serving dishes like “pig ear, chili, lime, fried egg,” they were starring in a Food Network show about their catering business, called 2 Dudes Catering. Shortly after, they released their first and (so far) only cookbook, Two Dudes, One Pan. We sat down with Dotolo and Shook at Son of a Gun to talk about their younger days, the business of cookbook writing, and whether or not to shoot a squirrel in the head. Here’s what went down.
The Cookbook Blog: Your cookbook Two Dudes, One Pan came out pretty much when you were opening Animal, right?
Jon Shook: It actually got printed and finished a couple of weeks before we opened Animal.
CB: So the busiest points of both projects were happening at the same time, basically.
JS: We were trying to attach that book to the T.V. show. So we didn’t name that book, you know what I mean?
Vinny Dotolo: It wasn’t our choice.
CB: And the concept for the book came from the show, too?
JS: Yeah. Well, kind of. Obviously the Food Network show wasn’t really a cooking show. It was a docudrama with food being the underlying tone, right?
CB: Right.
JS: The name of the show, obviously, and the food, is relatively similar, wouldn’t you say? From the show?
VD: From the show, yeah. It was more where we were then, with the catering and everything. It’s weird, because we got put in a position where we were in the spotlight… that’s kind of a reverse of how it normally works, the evolution of chefs…. Things have changed now, and I feel like we were on that weird cusp.
CB: No one really knew how it was going to work.
VD: Young guys were coming in, and they were starting in a different direction. We had been professionally trained from school. And like, a year and a half out in the field, and really underneath other people maybe two years, and then we started doing our own thing. So we never got to experience what these guys are experiencing now. And the growth process of all that — of having been through opening a restaurant, and going through a cookbook at the same time — the wealth of knowledge you learn from that changes you. We’ve changed since then. We’ve changed since Animal opened.
CB: I sort of look at Two Dudes in the way I look at early novels in an author’s career.
JS: It’s a little scattered.
CB: And as you get older, and what you want to do matures and changes…
JS: We didn’t even know who we were, really, when we wrote that book. You know what I mean? We were starting to learn who we were as individuals. In and out of work. How old were we? 23?
VD: It’s not like it’s impossible to do, it’s just a great deal of things.
JS: How old were we? 24?
VD: Animal was 3 years ago, I’m 31. Yeah, I was 28.
JS: We wrote the book in three months. That’s gnarly. Dude, that’s like balls-to-the-wall flooring it.
VD: It was a fun process and I’m glad we did it, but now looking back on it, we both kind of have a little bit of like, “Man, that was really kind of a stupid, silly thing that you can’t get rid of.”
JS: [laughing] We’re doing an interview right now about it. If it was anybody else but you, I would have said, “No way.”
CB: That’s okay, nobody reads this.
JS: And this story isn’t strictly about the book. It’s about cookbooks in general.
VD: You talk to most people about writing a book, and it sounds so amazing to get yourself out there. You know, the connection with the cooks and stuff like that. And somehow, those bigger companies always seem to mold and sculpt the book that they want it to be.
CB: There are a lot of other interests involved.
VD: Exactly. And then how they’re gonna market it. You know, I find it interesting. I bought a book about a year ago. It was the same dinner we just did at Animal, that Yotam Ottolenghi dinner. I bought the book about a year ago, and I bought it online. I had a friend who had been there, he said, “Oh, you’ve gotta check this guy out, and check out his book.” So I checked it out and I liked it. I had it on my shelf. Then the idea for this dinner came up, and they’re like, “Cool, we’re gonna send you guys copies of the book.” So they sent us a copy and I noticed that they had changed the cover of it for the American market. It was crazy. Inside, technically, there’s no difference.
CB: How did they change the cover?
JS: One’s a colored picture and one is white. The American is in color.
VD: You remind yourself of that forever saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But that’s what we do. We do judge books by their covers. You’re gonna judge this restaurant.
JS: You notice how our heads aren’t on the top of [Two Dudes, One Pan]? On the face? The face is covered? It never ages the book. We could be 65 and they could still be fucking pumping it out.
VD: It’s weird, you know…. If you get bigger, it feels like, the less creative they allow you to be. You know, like, Phaidon just put out, technically, the best chef in the world’s book. They put out the El Bulli book. So publishers also play a factor in where the book is seen. Does that make sense? What book market it hits, what price point it hits, and how they intertwine with what your business is.
CB: Diana Kennedy is one of the greats of the cookbook world. She’s one of the definitive authorities on Mexican cooking. But her last cookbook was published by a university, because no one would publish it the way she wanted it. She wanted there to be recipes for things like iguana with black mole.
VD: Independence, you know? There are just those people out there now who aren’t gonna take that kind of shit. I almost feel like even if we talked about doing a book right now, I feel like we’d go through that same painstaking process. That one, then, was like, more chicken.
CB: There were no sweetbreads in Two Dudes, One Pan.
VD: No. I feel like this one would be, if we dealt with a giant publisher at this very moment, this one would probably be like, “Too many ingredients in that dish. Too many pans.” And also, it was a game of trickery, too, for us, because we did try use as minimal an amount of stuff as we possibly could. We never set out to challenge ourselves to one pan, or one pot. It was a dangerous title for a book as well.
CB: I mean, some of the food comes out really well. Your Bolognese was great. The green beans with garlic, they turned out well.
VD: It’s all simple shit. The connection was supposed to be 20s college students to mid-40s. That’s what it is. It hits that audience. I can’t tell you how many people come up to us and are stoked to see and read it.
JS: And how many people have really liked it.
VD: And at the same time, we had those moments of reflection about it, and that time in our life.
CB: Vinny, one interesting thing I found when I was reading the early parts of Two Dudes, was that you referred to two people as “great chefs.” One was Escoffier, and the other was Shizuo Tsuji, who wrote a cookbook I love — Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. Was he an influence on you?
VD: I don’t know what part you’re talking about.
CB: That’s amazing. There’s a dialogue intro in your book, and you mention two great chefs.
JS: I thought the only chef we talked about in there was Jonathan Waxman.
CB: No, you name-checked Escoffier…
VD: You sure?
CB: Yeah. You have a copy here?
VD: Yeah, we do.
[Vinny gets a copy of the book. I show him the part I’m referring to.]
CB: Right here.
VD: That was you, Jon, who said that? [He reads it again.] Me.
CB: Does that name ring a bell to you at all?
JS: Yeah.
VD: I mean, if I read this whole thing, I would be like, “Man, this is the conversation we had?”
[Shook and Dotolo laugh.]
JS: It’s a different time, bro.
VD: I know. But he definitely didn’t have any influence on our food. Without a doubt.
CB: His stuff is basically explaining how to cook if you were training in a Japanese culinary academy.
VD: But is it the right way? You have to always ask yourself that. I think chefs got kind of burned out on that. “This is the way you do things.”
CB: Well his thing was more about showing you the classic preparation, but then encouraging you to substitute and modify based on seasonal ingredients and accessibility. He was all about how seasonality and adaptability is the true Japanese way. I mean, it was also published in 1980, so he’s explaining what sushi is to people for the first time.
[Dotolo continues to read through the Two Dudes intro.]
VD: This is funny too. Look at this right here. “I got an interview with Michelle Bernstein,” and it has Jon saying this. But it was actually reversed. I was the one who went down there for the interview, and he came with me. But by the time we were combing over this thing, we were also like, “What kind of tables are we gonna use?” We were already onto something else. Because you do, you write these things, and then you forget about them. And also, you don’t even do some of these things. I haven’t seen us do some of these dishes in forever. I mean, any of this stuff. In catering, sometimes.
CB: Well, yeah. A lot of this stuff goes back to your older catering days, right?
JS: Yeah.
CB: And a lot of that is based on what people are requesting, which is the exact opposite of your restaurants, where people can’t request any modifications at all.
VD: But no, I mean, the recipes work. There’s nothing bad about it. It’s just… I want to do something else. We’re not badmouthing it. It’s more on us. You just grow. A lot of chefs have books, and they’re like, “Oh man, that thing?”
CB: Martha Stewart isn’t up until 4 in the morning baking cookies to make sure the recipes work for her next book.
VD: No, but it’s more along the lines of, like, it almost captures you in a moment in your life.
JS: You want to know what’s crazy about all that? You’ve seen that movie Fish, right? The one I did? The funniest thing is that when I was making that, the guy — who’s a friend of mine — he’s like, “I’m making this movie for you for 25 years from now. Because when you look back in 25 years, and you watch this, you’ll be like, “Man, that was amazing when I was 30.” So it’s crazy how that all works, you know what I mean? It’s the same with the book. Right now, if the three of us sat down and wrote a book together, I’m sure that 20 years from now — or even three years from now — we’d look back and think…
CB: I can’t believe this…
JS: Animal has only evolved, and gotten better. So has Son of a Gun.
CB: Absolutely.
VD: We’re trying to get a better gator. We like our gator, but we want to get a better one. It’s a fifty cent price difference, so we’d have to charge a dollar fifty more.
CB: Oh, do you guys have any idea how I could score squirrel meat? There’s a recipe I want to make which calls for squirrel meat.
VD: Just go to the park and shoot a squirrel. Go somewhere you think the squirrel might be eating something decent.
CB: Because you don’t want city squirrel.
JS: City squirrels eat some shit.
CB: I talked to one chef, and he was saying I should hold it in a cage and feed it for a week to help filter out its system. But what am I gonna do with a squirrel in a cage in my apartment for a week?
VD: That would be awesome. Document that.
CB: But also, the recipe calls for two squirrels. And you can’t shoot it in the body, because they’re tiny, and it would ruin the meat. So I have to find a gun and shoot two caged squirrels in the head?
JS: That’s hilarious.
CB: Okay. Do you guys have any specific cookbooks that you want more people to know about?
JS: My go-to book is Culinary Artistry. It’s Karen Page and Andrew Dornenberg. They also did The Flavor Bible, which I have. They did [Becoming a Chef]. They’re good books.
CB: Vinny?
VD: Michel Bras’s book.
CB: What’s the deal with it?
VD: There’s something so naturally beautiful about it. It’s manipulated, but not over manipulated. It’s really inspired by nature. I think it’s a beautiful book. His techniques aren’t crazy-out there. They all make sense. His inspirations make sense. I would love to go there and eat. I haven’t been, and I haven’t really cooked out of the book, so I can’t say. I don’t know what the restaurant is like, but the book is amazing. I think it’s one of those books that seems timeless. It’s modern, elegant, and soft, but aggressive. It’s one of my favorites.
