He’s responsible for a third of the Michelin stars for sustainability in Mexico and also owns a regular Michelin star. He’s a failed baseball umpire. His truck smells of Persian cucumbers and quail. He makes his own wine, his own olive oil and opens oysters like a robot. And now Drew Deckman is finally opening his first restaurant in San Diego, with his son Sam at the stove and Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove a partner.
Over-promotion of restaurants is as gross as it is predictable, putting too much pressure on what is supposed to be a dinner party with a fixed address. But screw it. His arrival here, in this tiny New York restaurant gap, is the beginning of a new era for North Park.
31ThirtyOne opens on Wednesday, August 14th.
Deckman’s very existence is impressive. He is 6’6″ or 7’2″ tall. Two days before the premiere, he is sitting in his office, having to duck to avoid concussing himself on a low part of the ceiling.
“It’s an air shaft, so we can’t move it,” he laughs.
On the white board behind him are the words “PRECISION” and “EXECUTION.” Below that, in shakier script, is “I love my father,” written four or five times. His nine-year-old daughter has been through the whole process, watching her father cannibalize a failing restaurant, endure long delays and beg for mercy from the authorities, who had to approve everything before he could serve a single grain.
“A shaman has been here twice to cleanse the place,” he says. “She’s coming back on Friday.”
His hair, whitish-gray like the coals he has been cleaning from his grill under that Baja tree for the past decade at Deckman’s en El Mogor, makes him look like he has a snow cap. He is an alpinist. He has a permanent, slight hunchback, either the result of many years spent hunched over a cutting board in famous establishments run by famous gastronomic greats (Paul Bocuse, Jacques Maximin, his mentor Madeleine Kamman) or because he tries not to impose himself. He lowers his height to understand this.
Last night was his final “friends and family” dinner – dress rehearsals for his staff. Free meals served by invitation only for investors, friends and loved ones – grateful guinea pigs who are told to expect it all to go wrong and to be nice. Friends and families are an exorcism of the staff’s last fatal flaws before the doors open to the wild gene pop of foodie land.
The food was incredible and not perfect. A 14-day dry-aged ribeye steak with potato mousseline is a textbook steak and potatoes, the crust of the steak so good it drives you wild. The Mindful mushrooms (from growers in El Cajon) with kale and smoked bacon are not seasoned enough. At one point the whole ordering system doesn’t work. The kitchen staff is blind. A doorknob to the toilet keeps falling off. I walk past the kitchen (everyone walks by it, it’s wide open in the tiny center of the place, exposing the process) and he looks crazy, starved for a bit of control, a very experienced and capable captain on a boat with an engine fire.
The next day I go in to check on him. His staff has gathered around him.
“Last night was terrible,” he tells them. “I was terrible. I never want to go back there. But that’s why we’re doing this. If we’ve done a test run and everyone says everything is great, that’s no use to us.” He offers six or seven metaphors. At one point he holds up a sieve and equates his perfect circle with the crowd of people who make up a restaurant organism.
He doesn’t swear. He has a degree in philosophy. That’s what he does.
It’s so crazy to see Deckman here in a formal kitchen. For years he stood under pine trees in the dry, open wilderness of Baja, goggles on, smoke billowing around him, giant tongs in hand. I ask him how it feels to be locked up again.
“I love it,” he says. “I’m coming to terms with it now. That was my life for many years, that decade in Europe. It became my whole life then, and not in a healthy way. I was on the road 24 hours a day, had no opportunity to have relationships. I remember clearly when Bernard Loiseau shot himself because he was afraid of losing a Michelin star. That changed me. I stopped and said, ‘What the hell are we doing here?'”
And so he started free range. He worked on fishing boats in Hawaii and then Mexico. When he saw how much biomass was being thrown back into the oceans, he started to have a more comprehensive view of food. Deckman’s and now 31ThirtyOne are the reflection of that. All produce and vegetables come from farms in San Diego. Oysters from Baja. Food from his region.
“At some point you get so close that you only see a single dot on the page,” he says of the unhealthy side of cooking obsession. The bear-Kitchen life type. “Then you step back and see all these other dots that make up the bigger picture. If you only see that dot, it’s all ego. In the beginning, it was all about me. I thought I was the greatest invention since canned beer. But you can only be an idiot for so long before people stop answering their phones. When I moved away from the kitchen and found other things, I had to stay away from the fire. And then you realize it’s not about you. There are all these people holding the ship up. So stop trying to be the ship and the water.”
That’s why there are no titles in his kitchen at 31ThirtyOne. No hierarchy. “We’re all just cooks, we’re all just bartenders and waiters.”
When he opened 31ThirtyOne, he was so immersed in building plans, permit applications and plastering that he had no idea what the food would look like. “My PR team kept asking me, ‘Why don’t you have a menu? Do you realize you’re opening in a month?'”
After the construction workers went home, he sat alone in the kitchen in the dark, trying to see it. “I sat there for 45 minutes to an hour every night,” he says. “And then it finally came.”
Wednesday, we’ll see what happened.
