Pull Up a Chair

By: Chef Tom French

When I turned seventy, something unexpected happened. I wasn’t looking for another career. I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself. And I certainly wasn’t sitting around wondering what I was going to do with all my spare time. I simply realized there were still stories I hadn’t told.

Stories about food. Stories about family. Stories about people I’ve loved and places I’ve been fortunate enough to see. Stories about people I met only once and somehow never forgot.

And stories about how something as ordinary as a meal can occasionally become anything but ordinary. For most of my life, I cooked for other people. These days, I’d like to cook a little differently. I’d like to gather around the table with you. No reservations. No white tablecloths. No dress code. Just stories.

Some are funny, some are painful, some still make me laugh, a few still make me cry. All of them are true, or at least true enough. The funny thing about looking backward is that memory doesn’t behave chronologically. Mine certainly doesn’t.

One minute I’m standing in my great-grandmother’s kitchen watching her dust flour across a counter. The next I’m in New Orleans, or Seattle, or halfway around the world wondering how in the hell I got there. A smell will do it, a song, a cast-iron skillet.

Someone will say something across a dinner table and suddenly I’m somewhere I haven’t thought about in forty years. And almost always, somewhere in the memory, there is food.

Food has been the thread running through my life. It has carried me to extraordinary places, introduced me to remarkable characters, and given me a front-row seat to people at their very best — and occasionally their worst.

I’ve cooked in world-class restaurants and eaten at small-town church suppers. I’ve cooked for people with plenty and people with almost nothing. I’ve traveled from the Pacific Northwest to places as far away as Siberia. (We’ll get to that one.)

What I’ve learned along the way is remarkably simple: Food is never just food.

It is hospitality, it is history, it is resilience, it is celebration.

Sometimes it is comfort and almost always, if we’re paying attention, it is connection.

That’s what these Field Notes are about. They’re not intended to be a chronological autobiography. Think of them instead as scraps collected from a lifetime around food — people, places, meals, mistakes, adventures, recipes and a few things I didn’t understand until much later.

My hope is that somewhere along the way one makes you laugh, stirs up a memory of your own, inspires you to cook something, or gives you an excuse to gather around a table with somebody you care about.

That’s enough introduction, let’s get started.