(applause)

(upbeat music)

Did you guys catch that trip?

'Cause that's a really important part

of what I'm about (laughs) to talk about.

I'm Christina Tosi.

I am the pastry chef and owner and founder

of Momofuku Milk Bar.

I am a crazy dessert person.

I love to eat dessert, I love to make dessert,

I love to talk about dessert, I love to share dessert.

I was a home baker long before

I decided to become a pastry chef by profession.

I decided that I, just in my

fiercely competitive spirit and loving

dessert so much, that I'd go to New York City,

the most competitive place you could get into,

in the most brutal kitchens, and I would attend

culinary school and become a pastry chef.

But being a pastry chef back then

was being the pastry chef in a really

fancy restaurant, in a four-star restaurant.

So I moved to New York, I went to culinary school

and I fiercely, competitively worked my way

into the most competitive kitchens.

I realized, as I was making my way

to the top, that I was the person

that got to make the really fancy

cocoa nib tuile and place it just so on the plate

of this single-origin chocolate fondant

with passion fruit coulis, when really,

I was just like, oh, my God.

I can't wait to get home to put that

nob of oatmeal cookie dough in the microwave

for 30 seconds and just eat it, like gooey

and halfway melted in my pajamas. (laughter)

So I sorta stepped back.

I had to really think about what that was

and why I had chosen to put myself

where I had chosen to put myself.

Dave and I met, and obviously,

for really strange reasons, we get along.

We see eye to eye for no specific reason,

other than we sort of just are similar people

in parallel paths.

I loved that Momofuku had this spirit about it

and that it was comfortably human

and it was competitive and all of these other

parts of me that made so much sense.

I was a little scarred from the fancy

pastry (laughs) kitchens, so I started

working for Dave in this completely

un-pastry related capacity.

I was helping do office work and operational stuff.

Somehow, I wedged myself into the kitchen,

or Dave forced me into the kitchen, (laughs)

knowing that I had pastry background,

but also knowing that there weren't desserts

on any of the Momofuku (laughs) restaurant menus.

I found myself sort of back in this place

where I was like, aw, man, I'm back in the kitchen.

Not only am I back in the kitchen,

I need to make desserts for these menus

that anything could go on the menu.

I thought, all right, I'm gonna just pool

all the people I work I work with,

people whose palates I trust, people whose opinion

and approach to food I trust.

I'm just gonna ask them what their

favorite dessert is at a restaurant,

and maybe that'll just at least put me on a path.

So I asked, What's your favorite dessert?

I was asking the fanciest people I knew,

thinking that if I was gonna make desserts

for a restaurant, I was gonna have to really make

these really, really fancy desserts,

losing sort of my trajectory.

If I ask you guys what are your favorite desserts,

will you just shout a few out?

It could be anything.

Ice cream.

Oh, chocolate chip cookies, ice cream, right.

Guess what I got from these guys?

The same thing.

Banana cream pie, lemon poppy seed cake,

McDonald's fried apple pie.

I'm like, you are the culinary pedigree,

and that's what you got for me for dessert? (laughs)

Oh, my God.

I'm in trouble.

Then I realized that I was trying too hard again.

All the sudden, I was like, oh.

I know this 'cause I work at Momofuku.

Good food is good food.

It doesn't have to come with pretense.

It doesn't have to be anything.

It just has to be something that makes

a connection with you.

All the sudden, being a home baker first

was something that I wasn't trying

to steer away from, and I wasn't trying

to honor the sort of fancy culinary education

that I had.

It was about combining both of those things.

I made some desserts and put 'em on the menu,

and it went pretty well.

Then I opened Milk Bar.

For me, it's about giving food back

in a really simple, comprehensible vehicle

that when you see it, you wanna eat it.

From a user standpoint, you know that

it looks good.

You know that it's gonna taste good

the second you bite into, you know it's delicious.

That's all you need to do,

from a consumer standpoint.

Well, my job is to take the inspiration

and deconstruct it, and figure out how

I'm going to put all of my skill and expertise,

whether it's from the home baker in me

or the culinary professional in me,

and do all of the toiling and troubling

of how I'm gonna get it back to you

in the most simple, recognizable,

user-friendly and delicious manner.

Some of the most popular items (laughs)

at Milk Bar are as follows.

Cereal Milk is what's left in the bowl

after you eat all the cereal out of it.

We swirl it up into a soft serve ice cream.

We put it into every single thing

that we can think of.

Another big, popular Milk Bar item

is called Crack Pie.

It has a toasted oat crust and a gooey

butter filling.

For those of you that are familiar

with the St. Louis gooey butter cake,

it's also an homage to that,

which is a big staple in my childhood.

The Compost Cookie.

No one makes a better chocolate chip cookie

than my grandma.

That's all there is to it.

No matter how great of a pastry chef I am,

there's no way I know how to make

a chocolate chip cookie that's better

than your favorite chocolate chip cookie

because you already have that relationship with it.

I was like, well, we're gonna make cookies.

People love cookies.

But we're not gonna make a chocolate chip cookie

'cause that's dumb.

Why would I make something that already exists

and that people already love in their own right?

So the compost cookie.

It has pretzels, potato chips, oats,

chocolate chips, butterscotch chips,

graham crackers and coffee grounds.

Then we make layer cakes.

The chocolate chip cake is passion fruit,

coffee and chocolate, which is like

a really fancy pastry chef triumvirate of flavors.

I was like, instead of being fancy with it,

I wanna bring it down into this funny

little layer cake.

We build the cake in this very sort of constructive,

architectural way because that's what

pastry chefs do.

That's what you're trained to do

as a pastry chef.

But rather than hide all of the fillings

and these textures and layers that we dream up,

we keep the outside of the cake exposed

so that you can tell how much time

and effort and work goes into it.

We eat with our eyes before we eat

with our forks or our hands. (laughs)

We have this sort of elaborate process

of layering up this chocolate chip layer cake.

We make 14 different flavors of layer cake,

and every single one of them has

a really simple starting point.

Every single one of our desserts

has a really simple starting point,

whether it's a chocolate chip cookie,

whether it is a birthday cake,

whether it's ice cream,

whether it's Cereal Milk ice cream.

That is sort of my approach, on Momofuku terms

and on my own terms, of how I design desserts

that steal the show. (laughs)

(applause)

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