Ming Tsai: Voice of Fusion 4/4 | Asian American Innovators

Asian American Profiles

Chef Ming Tsai: Voice of Fusion

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     But we love hanging at home with our kids. We'll go out and go to a park and now I'm getting my son into tennis. Basically our whole priority now is kids because now they're four and two and for the next 15 years at least they're going to run our lives. But that's the bed we chose. There's nothing better than these two boys. As much time as we can possibly spend together is what we do. But I do travel. I'm traveling probably an average of a week, a week and a half per month, which is a good amount. Some months I travel three weeks a month which is absurd. This month I traveled just one day. It varies depending on demand.
     I'm not doing a second restaurant. I'm a one restaurant chef because one, it's for a quality life. I want to teach my son the forehand, backhand. I don't want to live vicariously through my tennis pro and nanny. I want to be the one doing that stuff. But I have tons of energy so I can't sit still. So instead of a second restaurant, I'm doing a lot more retail and starting to ramp that up. My deal with Target is going fine. I'm really impressed with cryogenics. These days all the frozen foods, they're using nitrogen and carbon dioxide and you can really control the quality, you can get restaurant quality. It's not quite as good as a restaurant but it's pretty darned close. We've done some stirfry kits and rice bowls and noodle bowls and a soup for Target and I'm certainly looking at many different options. Again same goal -- my goal has never wavered. My goal is how can Americans get east/west food into their homes. If they want to cook, great! That's one way of doing it. If they want it convenient and get a stirfry kit so that within six minutes you have a really hot tasty stirfry on your table that you did cook a little bit, right? I mean they were frozen but you got to put it into a wok or sautee pan. You can get satisfaction that you're using your brand new kitchen and your All-Clad and your Subzero Wolf stuff and there's that market -- which is five percent of the country probably -- that still likes to cook but doesn't want to prep. There are some great advances and potential in that market, I think.

GS: Is your travel mainly related to the retail business?
MT: Oh, it's all over. With public televison you have underwriters. All-Clad and Contessa and Clicquot are my underwriters right now, great companies. So I have to do couple of events for them each year because they gave me money to underwrite my show. I have again my retail products out there so I gotta go to the housware shows and fancy food shows and talk about my products, my Kyocera knives, so I'll go to the hosuewareshows to talk about that. I was at the same houseware show with All-Clad doing demos 'cause they're an underwriter.
     The second travel reason is I do lots of charity events. I do too many, at least once a month. Again believe you me, quality of life is fun because I'm being flown to Arizona to play in a celebrity golf thing and I gotta cook a furtada for example or I go to South Beach and get to hang with all my chef friends and cook a little bit and have a little fun. It all raises money for schools or cancer or AIDS or whatever the charity might be, but it's also a getaway from living in Boston in winter which is like a nine-month winter we have here.
     The third travel is the business, looking at new opportunities, new relationships. There's a lot of great companies out there and a lot of these companies want to continue going toward better food. Obviously Asian demographic is the fastest growing demographic in this country. More importantly, it's the best spending democgraphic. They do appreciate food but don't have as much time as we used to have as kids. Having said that, there's a lot of companies that are looking to east/west or asian style foods from ramen noodles all the way to frozen foods to chips and dips or whatever. New flavors per se for mass America. You have to remember fifty years ago Chinese food was egg foo yung,. Now it's like Szechuan, Cantonese, Hunan, Malaysian, Indonesian, Hakken -- there's so many.

GS: Is there a chance of having Blue Ginger become the basis for some sort of chain like Martin Yan's?
MT: No, I'm a one restaurant chef.

GS: Not that you would personally oversee it but license to a company that operates chain restaurants.
MT: I've probably turned down five, ten requests for that. The problem with restaurans, they're based on the people cooking. My whole career is based on reputation. If someone has a bad meal under my roof, I'm not a great chef, I'm not even a good chef. I can't risk that because I'm all about quality of food and quality of life.

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GS: You don't see cryogenics geting to the point where you could do it?
MT: Like I said earlier, I feel that I can do frozen kits and frozen foods and maybe even shelf table stuff because I can control that. In an ideal sense, you do it once, you test it ten times, you get it right, you set it up with a good manufacturer. That's how I control the quality 'cause in there you just make it all like that and it's exactly the same all the time. Restaurnats, it's different every day. If the line cook calls in sick, then who's gonna cook? You get the pantry guy who starts grilling off steaks and he doesn't know how to grill off steaks but you have to because you have 200 on the books. Then someone has a crappy meal and my reputation is shot. There's too many variables in brick-and-mortar restaurants.
Cryogenics, yeah, but you're not gonna serve frozen food in a restaurant. I wouldn't. People aren't paying to come to Blue Ginger for me to open up a stirfry kit and fire it up. To say you can get restaurant quality -- you can get close to it but you're not going to get restaurant quality because everything's fresh in a restaurant quality environment. Plus I don't want the restaurant or stress of owning more than one restaurant. Even if it's a corporation. Even if it's an Arrowmark, at the end of the day it's still your reputation. Having said that I will still look at every opportunity. If someone said, "Ming I'm going to give you a billion dollars. Will you do a chain?" I will certainly look at it. But it's not going to happen. No one's going to offer me a billion dollars. I'm happy with my formula the way it is. I'm not motivated by money. I'm not motivated by success. If I can raise my kids and give them at least what my parents gave me, I'm a success. I don't have the dream that I want to own a Learjet or I want to own five houses. If someone gave me a Learjet, would I take it? Of course. But that's not my dream to make two hundred million dollars so I can afford a Learjet. I'd rather just live my day to day well. Believe you me, I eat well, I have clothes, I have a house, I have a couple of cars with my wife. I don't really need more. But having said that I do have a lot of energy, I'm not just going to do a restaurant. But between the shows, the books and this whole retail space, I have plenty on my plate.