What is love?

In cooking, you can be technically proficient—even masterful—and yet still produce a failed meal. You also can be sloppy in your knife skills and presentation, and yet create a wonderful, rustic dish. The cliché is that the difference between a good and mediocre chef, or dish, is that love is obvious in one and absent in the other.

Since embarking on my culinary adventure, I’ve grown exceedingly tired of hearing “you need to cook this with love” or “this dish is missing love” or some other variation. If some of the best sonnets are unable to truly define the romantic idea of love, so what hope does some stupid hunk of charred animal carcass or sautéed vegetable have of conveying the culinary version? I thought using the word love to describe cooking was silly.

Until recently.

To graduate, I’m required to complete a short internship at a restaurant. I’ve chosen Marea, a new Michael White restaurant in Columbus Circle that specializes in fish. It has a crudo bar, some amazing Southern Italian creations and is gunning for the coveted four stars from the New York Times. It’s even rumored that my former man-crush Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin has eaten there, telling the kitchen that he’d have to “fire up my own staff” to match some of the dishes at Marea.

Since working at Marea, I’ve helped manage the garde manger station, prepping and plating appetizers, soups and salads, as well as shucking oysters. I’ve seen the love there. Whenever I try to finish something quickly and it is not perfect-looking or tasting, I’m chastised with a “soignée!” from the line cook. Which is French for “make it look elegant, you buffoon! Make it taste awesome, jackass!”

I’ve seen the love elsewhere, as well.

In class today, we cooked some of Thomas Keller’s meals (the end portion of the curriculum focuses partly on “cuisine from great chefs”). This is the guy who created the French Laundry in NoCal and Per Se in Manhattan. A god amongst men, in other words.

And I think after reading his recipes (truffle custards), cooking some of his food (butter-poached lobster) and eating more of it (vine-ripe tomato sorbet), I have an idea of what love means, at least in the culinary sense and within the boundaries of my own sensibilities.

Culinary love is when a chef spends an inordinate amount of time and effort to create something seemingly insignificant with food, but which yields an enormous amount of flavor, complex taste and beauty. It is taking hours to create something that initially makes people say “all that for this?” and then converts them merely to guttural mumbles and groans and belches. Something that gives someone, so to speak, a culinary boner.

But perhaps the biggest difference between food that is cooked with love and that which is cooked without is the attitude of the chef. If the chef is constantly excited and challenged by food, attempting to extract and enhance every bit of flavor and then discover yet more, then he or she loves food. If the chef sees food as too many of us often do, a comforting, familiar, boring piece of sustenance, then love is absent, and often a cut-rate lust replaces it.

I like to say that I love food, and love cooking. Hopefully this is a long-term marriage rather than a cheap, lustful dalliance.