The Secret of Cooking, and Mixing Cocktails

Plus David Milch, restaurant recommendations, what we're watching and reading, and more ...

In the winter of 1996, I went to the office of Uwe Hestnar, a chef-instructor at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY. I was at work on what would become The Making of a Chef. I wanted to learn what a person had to know in order to become a chef.

Chef Hestnar gestured grandly at his shelves. They buckled from the weight of hundreds of cookb…