A Journey of Taste

Director Sally Rowe documents award-winning chef Paul Liebrandt’s culinary ride for nearly a decade in the film, A Matter of Taste: Serving up Paul Liebrandt

By Kimberly Rupnarain | October 27, 2011

Chef Paul Liebrandt poses with a decapitated pig’s head, his chef’s coat spattered with blood and his face, plastered in an expression that reads passively unimpressed.

“This is bound to attract investors,” he says, as a photographer instructs him to hold the pig’s head by the ears. “You want to open a serious restaurant and they see photographs like this? No way. [They’ll say,] ‘He’s a nutcase!’”

“I’m not a nutcase,” he adds. “I’m just an artist.”

This quirky and slightly unappetizing scene is how the film, A Matter of Taste: Serving up Paul Liebrandt, begins. Directed by New Zealand native, Sally Rowe, A Matter of Taste documents almost ten years of British-born Liebrandt’s culinary journey in the cut-throat city of New York City, and is — as the opening scene and the subject of the film itself — a little quirky.

The film begins after Liebrandt, just 24-years-old, earns three stars from The New York Times, for his work as Atlas restaurant’s executive chef, and ends just after the opening of his current restaurant, Corton, almost a decade later.

“To see yourself in one hour, and age ten years is an interesting thing to see,” Liebrandt tells Lifestyler in a conference call with Rowe. “Probably in the first 15 minutes of the movie, I’m cringing a little bit. I was very young and… the viewpoints that I had, they’re not wrong, they’re just… from a young person as opposed to someone who’s been around a little longer.”

“It’s interesting to see the progression, not just in the food, but in the approach to cuisine. The way in which restaurants and chefs have evolved in general has been huge over the past 10 years, but to see yourself do it is actually really eye-opening and very interesting.”

The cringe-worthy beginning Liebrandt makes reference to includes scenes of the young chef discussing his lonely days growing up as an only child in London, the trials of dating and balancing work in one of the busiest cities in the world, and the trouble with serving gastronomic food in a time — and a city — still reeling from the aftershocks of 9/11.

The film shows how the tragedy not only affected the economic aspect of dining, but changed the culture as well. With patrons altering their tastes from experimental cuisine to classic comfort food — a shift took hold of the culinary scene in New York, embodying the exact opposite of what Liebrandt was trying to do.

“The restaurant industry is a pure mirror reflection of two things: An economic shift [and] also a cultural shift in the diner,” he says. “Restaurants are reactive to what customers want most of the time because that’s how you last…. That very hot, gastronomy-esque way of dining that was, 20 years ago, thought of as the way you needed to have a restaurant if you were going to be a fine dining restaurant, definitely shifted.”

In the film, it’s noticeable right from the start. After leaving Atlas to work at Papillon, a modest bistro in Manhattan, Liebrandt continues creating avante-garde meals for a short while before the restaurant’s owners decide to cut costs and increase traffic by catering to their demographic’s craving for comfort food, changing their menu to serve the ultimate in American comfort food: Burgers and fries. A creative but often unsatisfied Liebrandt, continues to struggle with adapting to the ever-changing industry for much of the movie, finally catching his stride with the opening of Corton in 2008.

Although Rowe, who was also working on other projects, did not originally intend to follow Liebrandt for nearly a decade, her interest in his unprecedented style of cooking was what kept her coming back.

“I ate at Atlas in 2000 and Paul was doing things that nobody else in the U.S. was doing,” she says. “His food was really beautiful and his flavour combinations were really exciting and the food was so colourful and beautiful on the plate that you had to actually pause and think about what you were eating. I met Paul and he was just so talented that I thought it would be an interesting journey to film him.”

In documenting Liebrandt’s long, and often bumpy, road to the successful Corton, Rowe’s aim was to create a film that showed the chef’s incredible dedication to the craft and as well as his unrelenting — and often unparalleled — creativity and innovation.

“I always admired the great chefs and appreciated all the work and thought and professional technique and training that goes into preparing the dishes that they put out every night, but I think following Paul — Paul has stuck with it,” she says. “He’s had controversy and he’s had great praise, but he’s always just been that sort of guy that’s quietly working away at producing great food.”

Although a 24-year-old Liebrandt may not have had a hold on all the dynamics of the fine dining industry, the addition of ten more years has given him an exceptional amount of experience and wisdom about the ever-changing culinary world.

And what does he think audiences would see if the cameras were to follow him for another 10 years?

“I think the next 10 years is that defining decade, of defining who the chef is and laying the foundation to a legacy. Not just of being a good chef but being an institution, being a brand, being someone that people don’t just look at as being a good chef, but as a role model,” he says. “I would like to think, in an ideal world, that the next 10 years will be no different to that. That it’s going to be more about defining who Paul Liebrandt is on a much bigger basis.”

» paulliebrandt.com

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