Aaron Silverman is chef and owner of Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury in Washington, DC. When I spoke with him, he described a path into cooking that began by accident, during a winter break in college, with a month long stage at 2941 Restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia. He torched tomatoes, picked herbs and learned to slice smoked salmon, and he came out of that month so taken with the work that he finished college a year early to enroll in culinary school.
Silverman speaks to three things in the book. The first is the calling that arrives quietly, as a job one did not intend to love. The second is the apprenticeship: his first kitchen, which he describes as still the toughest he has ever worked in, with long days and no breaks. What he took from it was the experience of having survived it, and the calm that experience gave him when he later walked into his own restaurants. The third is creativity, and here he gave me the line I return to most often in the chapter on the creative act. A failed experiment is feedback. The chef who can look at a failure long enough will often find in it the seed of a different success the original experiment was never aiming at.
“The willingness to let failures take you in a different direction and guide you to success is the essence of creativity.” Aaron Silverman, chef and owner, Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury
In the book, Aaron Silverman appears in Chapter 1, The Calling, where his month in Falls Church stands with Alex Atala’s traveling circumstance and Albert Adrià’s family favor as a calling that came late and without fireworks; in Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, where the reward of a brutal first year is who the cook became inside it; and in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, where his framing of failure is the operating posture the chapter builds toward, and the bridge to the discipline of perfection in the chapter that follows.