Alex Atala is chef and owner of D.O.M. in São Paulo. When I spoke with him, he was clear that the first time he entered a kitchen he never thought he would spend the rest of his life there. His European training, he says, was the result of a traveling circumstance, the phrase a Brazilian chef uses for what in English we might call an accident. In his own telling his path is an outcome rather than a decision. He was in and out of kitchens for a while for reasons that had little to do with cuisine, and then one day he was not out of one anymore.
Atala speaks to two things in the book. The first is the calling that resists being named. The foundation of D.O.M. and the global vocabulary of Amazonian ingredients that came with it did not begin as a childhood dream. It began as a life that accumulated slowly inside a kitchen until it could no longer be removed from one. The chapter on the calling sets his story beside Albert Adrià’s, who entered El Bulli at fifteen to help his brother, and Aaron Silverman’s, whose month in Falls Church changed his direction. All three are cases of the work refusing to be finished with the person after the person had declared themselves finished with the work.
The second is creativity, and here Atala gave me the chapter’s clearest statement of where new work comes from. A chef who wants to create a new dish needs a strong understanding of classic cuisine first. The new dish is a development of the old one. The chef who has not internalized the tradition the new dish departs from will produce a departure that is incoherent rather than original.
“Creativity flourishes from a solid foundation of knowledge. Any chef that wants to create a new recipe needs to have a strong understanding of classic cuisine.” Alex Atala, chef and owner, D.O.M., São Paulo
In the book, Alex Atala appears in Chapter 1, The Calling, where his decade of traveling circumstances is one of the stories of a craft that had already decided about the person, and in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, where his foundation of knowledge is the alternative to creativity understood as rejection of what came before.