David Kinch On Pesto, Buttery Olive Oil, and Bucatini

In A Chef’s Voyage, an Amazon Prime documentary released last December, Chef David Kinch from Manresa describes how to travel with hundreds of abalone and sauces without getting stopped by French Customs. The three Michelin-starred chef takes his team on a tour of France's top kitchens in celebration of the restaurant's 15th anniversary, and they cook with other renowned chefs.

These days, such chef-on-chef collaborations are rare, and chefs are more focused on how to shift to a hybrid model of in-person and to-go service. They're also helping people cook better at home—even Kinch, whose restaurants tend to offer rarefied dining experiences. This week, Kinch published a new cookbook, At Home in the Kitchen—Simple Recipes from a Chef’s Night Off, filled with approachable plates far removed from the extravagance of fine dining, taken from his home in Santa Cruz. So what does Kinch, the chef, surfer, team-builder, and vinyl record aficionado, cook for himself on days off?

Short answer: Italian inspired by travels to the Riviera. He swears by a 7-ingredient pesto, “the single greatest sauce in Italian cuisine,” which must be ground by hand using a chilled mortar and pestle. He touts a white pesto variation made with walnuts. He offers a pantry-ready version of pasta con le sarde, calling for canned sardines, and a cacio e pepe with freshly crushed pepper made by slamming a kitchen pot (should a grinder not be available) while listening to the popular oldies of Italian singer Domenico Modugno. Kinch debuts a few vibrant salad recipes that flaunt California’s Mediterranean harvest: almonds, citrus, and tomatoes. For those hoping to see his 30-plus ingredient recipe for the mezzaluna pasta as seen in his season of the TV series The Mind of a Chef, you won't find that here.

Most dishes are versatile and colorful, yet powerful, gratifying kitchen cravings at 3 a.m. and making dinner party guests extra hungry. An additional bonus: Every recipe comes with a song, so no playlist needed.

Last spring, Kinch opened a new restaurant outside of Santa Cruz called Mentone, where he serves a mixture of Italian and French food. Kinch named the project after one of his favorite towns on the French Riviera, Menton, a place that belonged to the Republic of Genoa until 1860, when it became part of France. Last Spring, Kinch cooked with one of Menton’s most renowned chefs, Mauro Colagreco, in one of his customary American-European kitchen collaborations. Similar to Mentone’s menu, the convergence of Ligurian, French, and Italian cuisine can be seen in several of his favorite recipes in this work. Here’s Kinch’s take on the rest. [This interview is condensed and edited.}

When did you start writing the cookbook?

All this started pre-pandemic, so it was more about dinner parties, having fun, cooking for your friends and yourself with recipes of six to seven ingredients at most. You can find everything at Whole Foods, and we wanted to design all the recipes so that every person could look at them and feel they could do it. Nothing would be too challenging and put them off from doing it. That was our idea.

What was it like when the pandemic hit?

As we were finalizing the book during late spring, early summer [of 2020], we were doing photoshoots in masks and socially distanced situations. I thought, “Oh my gosh, depending on how long this goes on, here we are coming out with a book on dinner parties and cooking for friends from home.” I thought, “What terrible timing!” But now our timing seems to be good. People are starting to get vaccinated, and people will spend social time together this summer. I'm not terribly worried about the timing and the theme at this point.

When you're in the home kitchen, what are you guided by? Do you think about a particular dish? An ingredient in the fridge? The temperature outside?

Well, you know at all of my restaurants, we try to create a happy experience for our guests. At home, I cook for myself; there’s no real formula. I tend to cook with ingredients that I find at the farmers' market, or seasonally. I eat a lot of tomato salads in the summertime and that sort of thing, but what tops everything is that it tends to be very simple. I cook complex food at Manresa, so at home, it tends to be about pure pleasure and simplicity. Much more homey cooking, and what pushes my buttons. My interests come and go. I go through a pasta phase, and then I go through a vegetarian phase. All that comes into factor. Essentially, what it is, is that I cook for myself and not for other people.

Tell me about your vinyl collection and how that found its way into the cookbook. I saw that you paired Italian singer Domenico Modugno with cacio e pepe. For cooking pasta, are there jams and rhythms that you feel go well with the recipes you chose?

No, it was semi-random. A lot of times, when [co-author] Devin [Fuller] and I were working and testing the recipes together, it was the music in the background and what we played at dinner parties. The vinyl collection is very eclectic. I started buying in my early teens. It’s a hobby.

Any records from your time in NYC, Japan, or any of those places?

Yes, of course.

You have lived in France and Spain, in particular, on the Riviera. Have you spent a lot of time in Liguria, Italy?

I’ve spent a lot of time there. I have a great friend, Chef Mauro Colagreco, with a restaurant there in Menton, a border town on the coastline between Genoa and the French border.

I’ve cooked there with Mauro on five different occasions. We go way back to when our restaurants first opened.

Aside from Cacio e Pepe, how did you narrow down the pasta recipes that appear in your book?

Of course, you think about it. For me, it was what I like to cook at home. I’m a big fan of bucatini. I love the chew. I love the fact it's not spaghetti. I have bucatini around my house all the time, and I also like fresh pastas and flat noodles as well. I like all kinds of pasta, but the one I’ll choose last is always the big hearty and meaty ragùs. I tend to like things that are light and delicate. I like fish, vegetables, herbs, and pastas. Yet another reason why I gravitate towards Liguria.

In your list of essential ingredients, you say no peppery olive oil. Why is that?

That’s a personal preference. I’m not a big fan, I mean, for certain dishes, yes. For me, it tastes unripe. It has a really intense black pepper flavor. My favorite olive oils come from Italy. You can go to the South of France and Catalonia, and it’s all very much in a Ligurian-style, where olives are really ripe and really, really low acidity, and much more fruity. They have the taste and texture of melted butter as opposed to something that tastes infused with black peppercorns. For me, they are much more delicate and much more fragrant. That’s why I like them.

For your pesto recipe, you mention that the mortar and pestle need to be chilled. What does that do?

If you sit and work the pesto too long, the basil starts to oxidize because of the heat. If you ever put food into the food processor, you’ll notice that it warms up because of the motor and the friction. It’s the same thing here. If you want to have a bright green pesto, you do everything you can. I know some people who throw in small ice cubes and pound it to help keep it chilled as well. For me, I throw the marble mortar into the fridge for a few minutes or more.

Have you planned any new chef-on-chef cooking collaborations in 2021?

Everything is kind of on hold. I canceled at least three trips to Italy for collaborative dinners. But I don’t want to say they’re canceled, just postponed. We’ll see what 2021 brings. I don’t think anybody is going to be traveling to cook probably until 2022.

A Chef’s Voyage was about what happened when the Manresa team celebrated its 15th anniversary and collaborated with the top kitchens in France. In it, you say “I have a plan.” What’s happening in the coming year?

First thing, get the businesses up and running and back to normal. I think that’s occupying all my time right now.