Notes, News, and Nerdiness from JKLA World HQ

Last weekend I was in New York for a special edition of Tasting Notes that I produced in partnership with The Knights, a multi-Grammy-nominated chamber orchestra started by my old friends Colin Jacobsen and Eric Jacobsen, and featuring compositions by Colin, Grammy-nominated violinist and composer Tessa Lark, and Gabriel Kahane. It was an overwhelmingly joyful experience to be able to cook and make music with some of my oldest and dearest friends (I've known Colin and Eric and played music with them since I was 6 years old), and to share it with an engaged audience.

Tasting Notes is the live food and music show I started with the Seattle Chamber Music Society a couple years ago. It’s always been an experimental show—how could a stage show that combines live cooking demos and classical music with conversation and interaction not be?—and the format is one of the things we’ve experimented with most in recent renditions.

But before anything else, thank you to everyone who came out to either the Seattle or New York performances that have already happened this season. These shows only work because audiences are willing to lean into the experiment with us: to taste things blindfolded, to listen actively, to participate, to laugh, and to stay curious. Seeing rooms full of people willing to engage that openly and enthusiastically has been genuinely inspiring.

In the past, the show was performed in a regular auditorium with a seated audience, and while I think the demonstrations and performances were thrilling and the conversations were interesting, the biggest downside was that it was impossible for everyone in the audience to taste what the guest chefs and I were cooking on stage. At the same time, the parts that the audience responded to the most and felt most engaged by were the interactive demos. Things like tasting chocolate while two different types of music were performed and seeing how the music affected the flavor. Learning exactly how our noses are far more sensitive than our tongues, and how aroma processing is deeply linked to memory and emotion.

So for this season, we decided to address that. Our last Seattle show was in Town Hall in early April. For that show, we stripped the production down to its bare essentials. I cooked on stage, Tessa performed with her violin, and Ed Levine—my old friend and colleague from Serious Eats—hosted the evening.

Rather than simply presenting music and cooking demonstrations side by side, we went into a deeper exploration of the senses and how they work together to trigger memory, emotion, and meaning.

Through live demonstrations and interaction, the audience listened to music and tasted foods blindfolded. They saw how sound can affect the way we interpret flavor and visual art. They learned how sensitive our noses, tongues, ears, and eyes really are. They experienced how musicians create timbre and tone by carefully shaping the overtones produced by their instruments, and how chefs build flavor in similar ways by layering aromatic compounds. Everyone in the audience got a taste of mapo tofu, and the evening ended up feeling equal parts concert, dinner party, science lesson, and shared experiment.

This past weekend in New York, we took the show in a different direction, this time with a room full of tables and a full three-course meal integrated directly into the performance. For the first time, the audience not only saw the stage demonstrations, but got to taste every dish as it appeared in the show, and it’s not a stretch to say that it was the most successful incarnation of Tasting Notes yet.

The central theme of the New York performance was the idea of American culture—not as a melting pot where distinct identities dissolve into sameness, but more like a fugue, where independent voices enter one at a time and maintain their individuality while interacting to create something larger and more complex. American music works that way. American food does too. Traditions arrive from elsewhere, collide with geography and circumstance, adapt to new ingredients and new neighbors, and over generations become something entirely their own.

That idea ran through the entire evening. I prepared the beef dumplings I learned from my mother as a child, but topped them with a dollop of XO sauce made with pastrami fat—one of the favorite flavors of my youth. I cooked Cantonese-style steamed salmon inspired by the whole steamed fish my grandfather loved for celebrations in Chinatown, adapted through the lens of the Pacific Northwest. The music moved just as fluidly across traditions: Tessa Lark’s compositions folded together Appalachian fiddle music and classical virtuosity; Gabriel Kahane’s work drew from folk song, theater, and chamber music; Colin Jacobsen’s music reflected the same conversation between inheritance, migration, and reinvention that defines so much of American cooking. The evening wasn’t really about proving that food and music are “similar arts.” It was about showing how both become vehicles for memory, identity, and cultural conversation.

I’m excited to see how Tasting Notes continues to evolve with each performance.

Our next show will be back in Seattle in July as part of the Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival. We’ll be hosting it at The Triple Door on July 6th, and it will feature a full four-course meal, with each course prepared by a different guest chef. I’ll be cooking alongside Taichi Kitamura of Sushi Kappo Tamura, recent James Beard nominee Christina Wood of Temple Pastries, James Beard Award winner Mutsuko Soma of Kamonegi, and Rick Yoder of Wild Ginger.

The evening will be co-hosted by myself and Grammy award-winning violinist James Ehnes, the musical director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society, and will feature a world-class lineup of musicians from the festival.

I’m really looking forward to seeing you all there. Tickets are available here: Seattle Chamber Music Society – Tasting Notes

Four Virtues, One Gift!

Father's Day is quickly approaching and if you need an easy gift for the dad in your life that likes to cook (or to nerd out on kitchen knives), look no further!

You might know Japanese santoku (literally “three virtues”) for its mastery of slicing, dicing, and mincing. The KAN x Kenji Shi-toku adds a fourth virtue: motion. Read more about it here. It's not quite a santoku nor a Western chef’s knife; it's designed for both precision and rhythm—for that intuitive, dance-like motion that happens when your knife becomes an extension of your hand.

You can grab one today on KAN's website (and use code "KENJI" at checkout for a discount)!