Fewer, Better Ingredients on the Web
I remember it quite clearly. It was two years ago: the day I started loving to cook. I was wandering around the bottom floor of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore and happened upon a copy of Alice Waters’s “Simple Food”. Since the opening of Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley in 1970, Californian Cuisine has become somewhat of a cult following in restaurateurs worldwide. Waters’s simple ethic of high quality, in-season and local ingredients has influenced chefs to start thinking less about what they can ship in, and more about what they can find down the road.
However, many overlook the true revolution Waters brought to the table: the revolution of simplicity. Too often, Haute Cuisine is an elaborate and showy charade of multiple reductions, rare ingredients, and unnatural forms. Waters introduced the idea that simplicity itself could bring out the most important elements of a dish. It was less about elaborate presentation and more about creating a modest, satisfying dish from only the freshest ingredients.
Cooking, for me, has never been so far away from my other passion for the web. I find that cooking often teaches me more about building and creating for consumers than any book on amazon ever could. I find often, that we over-engineer our solutions for folks, when all they really want is a delicious simple meal. One of my favorite chefs Nate Appleman says in his cookbook: A16 Food and Wine, “When wrestling with a recipe I’ll remove ingredients instead of adding them. Often by simplifying a recipe, it will become much more elegant and delicious”.
Sites these days are replete with niche features that don’t relate to their core concepts. Social layers get added just because they can. All of a sudden, its in every product’s best interest to be able to post 160 character updates (I’m looking at you Google Reader). Product managers and engineers are adding ingredients left and right, and while still edible, the results are often less delcious than a simplified straight-to-the point dish. But why? Are we embarrassed by simplicity? Does everything need to be over-engineered? What if we just stripped our products down to the bare essentials and got *really* good at the basics? Some companies have done quite well sticking to fewer, better ingredients. Could you?
