Adam Baird

When did food capture you? Food captured me, the typical story, with my grandmother. She used to cook traditional Australian dishes at home, but actually, I got really interested when I started washing dishes in an Italian restaurant in high school and through college. The grandmothers would come in and they did everything from scratch. I wrote the recipes down and still use some of them today. It was neat to see that family-minded approach to cooking, the use of great ingredients and old recipes.

What is so cool about an open kitchen? I’ve opened a few of them… when I was at Greystone, the Wine Spectator restaurant, and then Napa Rose. Really, I think it’s a show, it’s a great show when it’s done right. It shows that there’s nothing to hide, but it also makes the kitchen crew and the chefs and everybody work that much more professionally and clean and quieter. It’s a totally different ambiance than a closed kitchen, which can be quite loud with a lot of banging. So you have to be mindful of more than just what you’re preparing, that people are watching you, your sanitation, so many other things. It’s a total show. That’s what I love. It’s fun.

How is it that an executive chef of high end restaurants now creates new menu items for The Habit? It’s an interesting divergence but my prior experience was with our CEO, who I love working with, so I had a great opportunity to come here and work with this group. It’s a different job in some contexts, but what I love about The Habit is that there’s a lot more culinary expertise involved than people may think and we’re going to play with the menu a little bit. We’re not going to do massive changes, we’re testing some things now. It has to be a real home run to come into play, but it’s fun to create and help develop the brand. It’s a new adventure, so, we’ll see where it takes us.

You’re going to love this one. Does bathroom cleanliness reflect on the kitchen? [Laughing] I think it does. It reflects on any business. The first thing I’ll do is go into the bathroom of a business and see what’s going on in there. You can go to the bathroom in the general manager’s office and basically know how well the restaurant’s run. But definitely in a food establishment, it’s important. If you’re not maintaining that then who knows what’s going on elsewhere. I ask it because Habit has always got a clean one. That’s my pet peeve. That’s the goal.

What do you do with the family for fun? My kids are pretty young so we’ll take them to those parks like SeaWorld, those types of things, they like that. Sometimes on Sundays we do baking or we’ll cook together. They know how to make meatballs—pretty good meatballs, too—and they like baking whatever’s sweet. Chocolate. Chocolate chip cookies. Anything with chocolate in it, they’re good to go. They think Blondie’s are quite hilarious… because they don’t have chocolate.

If you could have dinner with one chef, dead or alive, who would it be? Ferran Adrià, probably, from elBulli in Spain. I met him once but we have a little bit of a language barrier, he speaks Catalan. I just think he’s fascinating and revolutionary. It’s not so much that his food makes him the best chef in the world, it’s his technique and his depth of research and how he runs the large kitchen staffs he’s had and what they execute. It’s just amazing. He’s like a wizard with what he’s done. So, he’d be fun. Definitely. He does the same thing with photographs, cool techniques and visuals. I see a book over there, too. Yeah I’ve got his books and stuff. A lot of it’s hard to do at home, you need to have all the right stuff.

What recipes are you most proud of creating or reinventing? I love my paella. I lived in Europe and learned a lot of classic Spanish cuisines, so I make a really traditional paella. I usually make it for 12 people because it takes 4 or 5 hours to make the whole thing. It’s a really great dish. It’s in a big paella pan and I finish it over the open flame like you would in Spain.

Where do you like to eat on a night out? I mix it up. It ranges from classic French, like a Marché Moderne, to really a lot of ethnic. I love the Vietnamese food, love eating ramen noodle Japanese food. I really enjoy kind of eating ethnic food in that context. I like traditional Mexican food. So I mix it up you know? I mix it up. But lately it’s been a lot of Vietnamese, Korean type food. That sounds good right now. We’ve got this Vietnamese place right next to the studio, but… Is it good? I don’t know, I haven’t been in there yet! Couldn’t even tell you the name because the sign is all scratched off and a little sketchy, you know? Sometimes you just have to point. There’s ones around here you have to point to because it’s all written in Vietnamese. But you should give it a try.

Do you take risks in creating your recipes? I always try to, I mean, these days I don’t have a traditional method of following recipes. I’ll read recipes, then I’ll adapt them. But I try to adapt them to my style, which is pretty much wine country cuisine. I like playing around with the modern molecular stuff at times, trying to increase textures and different flavor profiles, combining those types of things. I’m always trying to explore flavors.

Favorite kitchen tool? What could you not live without? I’d say a blender. Yeah, because I can do a lot with a blender. I like blenders for the kinds of textures they create.

What local farms do you utilize? I like to go to a lot of the farmers markets. There’s one in Orange, there’s one in Irvine. We’ve used Kenter Canyon and I’ve been to Chino Farms and you have the benefit now of all these great farmers markets. Once or twice a week, you just go and just check out all the different types of small farmers and suppliers and they even have meats now and seafood and eggs and things. So, I leverage the farmers markets in particular since there’s such great ones out there.

How has your approach to cooking changed over the years? I think it’s just gotten more complex because I’ve developed a better understanding of ingredients and spices and how things come together. If nothing else, it’s probably more lengthy in the components and the depth of it. Letting things pickle a little longer in a base and expanding the ingredient base wider, using some more contemporary ingredients like xanthan gum and gelatins. I’ve developed more complex food, but essentially it’s the same foundation. That part hasn’t changed.