Toby Archibald on Quarter Acre and Michelin Kitchens

Chef's PSA

Toby Archibald The Chef Who Traveled the World to Build One Perfect Restaurant in Dallas Ep. 214

00:00 / 01:20:28

Chef Toby Archibald is the New Zealand-born chef and owner of Quarter Acre, a Michelin Guide restaurant on Lower Greenville in Dallas. Texas Monthly named it one of the Best New Restaurants in 2023. D Magazine ranked it a Top 5 restaurant. He spent twenty years working through Michelin-starred kitchens in London, Canada, New York, and Australia before opening Quarter Acre in December 2022. His career includes sous chef at The Greenhouse in London, sous chef at Café Boulud Toronto and New York under Gavin Kaysen and Aaron Bludorn, and Executive Chef at Georgie by Curtis Stone.

This episode starts in 2006. Toby is 23, backpacking across America, staying in a hostel. He gets a reservation at Restaurant Daniel. Shows up 20 minutes early, gets fitted with a dinner jacket from a room full of them, sits in the middle of the dining room as a solo diner, and has a meal he cannot describe but has never forgotten. That one dinner changed the entire direction of his career, his life, and who he is as a chef.

Why you cannot learn to really cook from YouTube because you cannot taste or smell what is happening in the pan, and the critical learning lives entirely in that gap
The difference between French charcuterie and Italian salumi and why calling a plate of Italian cold cuts a charcuterie board is almost always the wrong name
What one extraordinary hospitality experience at age 23 can do to a twenty-year career and why Daniel Boulud built his entire reputation on making every single person feel exactly the way Toby felt that night

André and Toby cover the Bocuse d’Or dinner at Kent Rathbun’s house where this friendship started, the language barrier at The Greenhouse that forced real learning, the seventh generation charcutier at Café Boulud Toronto who could debone a pig with a spoon, Gavin Kaysen leaving New York a week after Toby arrived, Daniel Boulud pulling out his phone at Toby’s farewell dinner to look up Sydney hotels, and what Quarter Acre is and why it is impossible to put in a box.

Guest