156 CHICAGO | SEPTEMBER 2019 Illustration by KATHRYN RATHKE
BACKROOM
Q For the first seven years that Frontera Grill and Topolobampo were open, I worked
the line every night. It’s my favorite thing to do. You get into this wonderful flow that
people talk about, when all of a sudden time stands still.
Q I take criticism really hard. It used to bring me down for days. Total funk. A lot of
self-help books say things like, “Don’t feel bad, just use it as a learning experience.”
Well, I do feel bad, dammit. But it doesn’t crush me like it used to.
Q I have to cook something, beginning to end, every week. It’s like my religious expe-
rience. I do Sunday brunch and Monday dinner at home. I have that time cleared on
my calendar so I can go to the store or farmers’ market and be inspired by things I
might not come across in my regular life at the restaurants.
Q When you’re from Oklahoma City, sports is everything. My brother excelled at every
sport. I was the weird fat kid who was into the creative stuff. When I got to high school,
I thought, I’m going to lose the weight. I started really cutting back on what I ate. But
I thought I couldn’t be athletic because I had been told I wasn’t, so I didn’t even try.
Q My physical activity is yoga. Intense yoga, not the kind where you go sit in a class
and stretch. I hold poses until I want to scream. It really helps me get clarity on things.
Q Writing my memoir has been hard, because it was a really ugly childhood. My
parents were not very encouraging. Most of the time they just rolled their eyes
The celebrity chef, 65, on his extreme yoga, brutal childhood,
and strong aversion to criticism Interview by MIKE THOMAS
at me because I wanted to do stuff way
beyond my years.
Q My mother was a very self-centered
woman with a very strong public image.
She was always leading some organiza-
tion, and people thought she was God’s
gift to the world. But she was a very dif-
ferent person at home. At her funeral last
year, my brother and I stepped away from
doing any kind of eulogy for her. People
who were there just gushed about how
she inspired them and how she did all of
this stuff in the community. My experi-
ence with her was not that.
Q My father was very closed off, so there
was not much of a relationship there. It’s
really sad to me, but I don’t know if he had
anything to give.
Q I come from a family of raging alcohol-
ics on bot h sides, a nd not just my mot her
and father. Alcoholics, drug addicts, emo-
tionally unstable people. And there were
loads of suicides. I never wanted to have
a kid because I didn’t want to continue
that, but it’s really the best thing I’ve
ever done. There have been times when
I’ve had no idea what to do and, like my
father, I wanted to retreat. But I married
well and have had lots of therapy.
Q My wife, Deann, has a good head on her
shoulders. And she’s much steadier than
I am. She’s also incredibly moral. With
any decision we have to make, she’s the
one who will say, “People, this is the right
thing to do.”
Q The only way to really understand a cui-
sine is to understand the culture. And I
don’t mean somebody telling you what the
culture is like. I mean living the culture
so much that you begin to develop your
own memories about it. It’s not enough
for me to just go to Mexico and taste the
food. I had to eat it over and over in differ-
ent regions for a number of years. Once I
did that, the food and culture melded for
me. That’s what’s missing from so many
young chefs who spend two weeks in a
place and come back to open a restaurant.
Q Everybody laughs at me because I’ve
got so much energy. Honestly, if you made
me retire, I’d have another restaurant
opened in six months because that’s just
who I am. CRick Bayless
The absolute worst
thing a diner could
say is “Oh, that was
really interesting.” We
don’t want them to be
interested. We want
them to be swept off
their feet.