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What you look for when hiring a chef to work in your kitchen?

Basically that they love cooking. A lot of chefs don’t, they do it as a profession or craft, but I always ask chefs the last thing they cooked at home. If they say, “I don’t really cook at home,” that’s not really the kind of person I wasn’t to work with. All the chefs I work with love to explore, go to the farmers market, buy stuff and play around with it at home.

What’s a dish that you like to cook at home on a regular basis?

I never go back to the same dish twice. I’m always doing something different. I’d never made garganelli pasta, so I made garganelli with fresh peas and cream from the market and this really wonderful local cheese we have.

What’s the cheese?

Kaskaskia, a small local cheesemaker

What inspired your recent focus on Baja?

I hadn’t been there for a while and heard amazing things of what was going on in northern Baja, and already knew a number of chefs from southern Baja. I thought we should go there, look and see what was going on. A few years ago, I’d visited the wine country and knew it was white hot. There are more boutique wineries there than in Napa…Even that close to this amazing winemaking area, people don’t even know about it. So far the U.S. has turned their back against it. I don’t know why…I’d been there a number of times and wanted to introduce it so people would get a sense there…[In terms of the restaurants] it blows away a lot of cities in the United States, top to bottom, from high end to street food.

Has anything surprised you about what’s happening in Baja at the moment?

What I think there’s cool is that there’s virtually no American tourism – 10% of what it was years ago – so all of what’s going on in terms of the wineries and restaurants, it’s all for the locals. They’re not pandering to tourists. They’re developing it because they love the stuff. That’s all super cool. Really amazing olive oils, that surprised me. In fact in our restaurant, we switched over to all Baja olive oils.

If you could only cook with one more animal, what would it be and why?

I’d probably jump off a cliff. I’m such an omnivore. It would be so boring, I’d probably become a vegetarian. Pork can give you all sorts of textures and tastes and you can get fat you cook with, so it’s probably the most versatile, but I’m not sure I’d like to cook with just that, so I’d probably become mostly vegetarian.

What’s the longest you’ve ever waited to sit down for a restaurant meal, and was it worth the wait?

Probably it was the café at Chez Panisse at its height, and that would have been about 25 years ago. I probably waited four and a half hours, and it was worth every minute.

Where do you like to drink and what do you like to drink when you’re not working?

I’m kind of a big omnivore when it comes to anything culinary. I love exploring. Right now there’s a new distillery in Chicago, Koval, they make small batch white whiskeys made from local grains, including millet and rye. They’re white whiskeys, so they’re not aged in anything, and they’re astonishingly good.