Photos by Samantha Marble

Admittedly, I don’t know too much about cooking. But I do know a decent bit about music, and Brooks Headley has drummed in more than a few notable—even seminal—punk and hardcore bands over the years, including Universal Order of Armageddon, Born Against, the (Young) Pioneers, Oldest, Skull Kontrol, and Wrangler Brutes. I wanted to interview him, though, because he’s also the Executive Pastry Chef at Del Posto, New York City’s only four-star Italian restaurant. It’s not often that people can reach the top of two very different games, but last year Headley won the James Beard Award—basically the Oscar for chefs—and his first cookbook, Brooks Headley’s Fancy Desserts, is out on October 21 via W.W. Norton.

And while the 42-year-old is now a celebrated chef at a very fancy restaurant (as well as a veggie burger innovator), he still makes punk and heavy music from time to time. He participated in the UOA reunions, he plays in C.R.A.S.H. with Dean Spunt of No Age, Cundo Bermudez of Wrangler Brutes, and Mika Miko’s Michelle Suarez, and he’s also in Music Blues with another food man, Harvey Milk bassist Stephen Tanner, who’s the chef at the Commodore in Brooklyn.

I visited Headley at Del Posto one afternoon to discuss his cooking, his book, and how he’s been able to continually navigate between the worlds of music and food.

Pitchfork: How did food play a part in your former life as a touring musician?

Brooks Headley: Most bands are obsessed with food on tour because you don't have a home base, so it's all about what you’re going to eat or where you’re going to eat it. Every band I was in was vegan or vegetarian, too, so the struggle of finding stuff was half the fun—sometimes the food aspects of being on tour were more fun than the actual shows.

For the first couple Born Against tours, we actually took a milkcrate with a frying pan, some olive oil, salt, and spices, because a lot of the time we wouldn't eat out. We would play the show and go back to people's houses and cook, or just go to the grocery store, because none of us drank or partied or hung out. The whole fun of doing the tour was driving for 700 miles, playing for 15 minutes, and going back to some kid's parents' house and making spaghetti. Food controlled a lot of the stuff we did.

Pitchfork: When did you realize you were good at cooking and that it was something that could pay the bills?

BH: I always cooked a lot and watched cooking shows like "Great Chefs" on PBS, or really early Food Network shows. Food television is really fuckin' terrible now, but back then there was cool shit. "Great Chefs" had these weird French chefs with fuckin' weird facial hair making this super weird French food. So I would watch stuff like that, but I never once thought that I would actually cook food for a job because I'd only ever done it for fun.

After graduating from college with a pretty worthless English degree, I was living in D.C. and I didn't have anything to do, so I got a job in an office—and I just hated it. I ended up complaining about it enough that my girlfriend at the time found an ad in City Paper that said, "Pastry Assistant Wanted." So, for some reason—maybe it was to spite her for trying to tell me what to do—I made up a fake résumé and cover letter and faxed it over. Maybe that was my English degree working—I was able to write them a decent letter to get my foot in the door even though I had no fucking idea what it was all about. It ended up being a job at the best Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C. at the time.

I worked for Laurie Alleman, who was the pastry chef at Galileo when I started. She brought me on as cheap labor and, after a couple weeks, she figured out that I was really into it—but also that I had no experience. But cooking in this really nice kitchen at this really nice restaurant for months and months and months didn't even feel like a job. I would bake bread in the morning and bring it in to her to critique, and all the other cooks would look at me like, "Ah, you're such a dick! Why do you like this so much?" I instantly loved it.

It's funny because even from that point, which was 1999, to now, I've only ever worked in fancy high-end places. For me, it's all about the uniform: a hat, the starch white shirt. A lot of times if I go some place and it's a dude in a baseball hat and shorts I'm like, “Argh.” It's like if you go record with Steve Albini, he puts on an Electrical Audio jumpsuit before he starts working; if you're at work, you have to be in uniform.

Pitchfork: As far as doing pastries specifically, was that something you had an interest in before you took that first job?

BH: No! I had zero interest in dessert. That was just the job I applied for. And at the time, I was vegetarian, so I wouldn't have wanted to work the line and break down ducks or cook with meat because I would've found that repulsive. With desserts, you're making stuff that doesn't exist, but you're using a bunch of the same stuff. You can take butter and flour and eggs and sugar and make 50 different things. It's about making something out of nothing: manipulating fruit or vegetables to turn them into something else is extremely gratifying. It's like mowing the lawn when you're a little kid—you would finish and it looks perfect. If you wanted to put it in musical terms, it’s like four people going into a practice space and then coming out with a finished song where the sum is greater than the parts.

Pitchfork: Did you have to prove yourself when you started at Del Posto?

BH: Yeah. It was difficult to find a staff. I have an amazing staff now, but for a long time, no one wanted to work here because if you go to school for making desserts, there's a lot of specific techniques that I don't do because I'm not physically capable of doing it or I have no interest in doing it. That's why it's funny that I ended up in such an opulent restaurant. But [executive chef] Mark Ladner, [and owners] Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali are making their version of Italian food in New York City in this day and age. They never really wanted technical, structural, architectural food—which is good because I can't do that anyway!

I know chefs that did everything the right way: did their internship as a teenager and then went to culinary school and worked their way up from peeling potatoes to being a chef across 15 years. And I'm not discounting that. But I never planned to do that because, when I was 15, I just wanted to be in a band that sounded like Joy Division. I had no foresight to know that, 25 years later, I would be cooking food at a restaurant in New York City.

Pitchfork: Recently, there seems to be more crossover between food and music, whether it’s black metal cuisine or a Radiohead-themed tasting menu. What’s your take on this trend?

Brooks Headley: A lot of it seems manufactured. When I started professionally cooking in a restaurant, it was the late 90s and I never once dared to talk about the fact that I had been in a band—or was actually in a band—as the years have gone along. So it seems a little strange that it's accepted now, so much so that the theme for the James Beard Awards this year is “music and food.” They've asked everyone to do a dish for the gala based on their favorite musical city. Even five years ago, people would have just been like, “That's sort of stupid.”

Personally, I find a lot of connections [between food and music], because it's so ingrained in who I am, but I try to not make it a focus. Because it's such a personal thing for me, I don't even really like listening to music while I'm cooking, even if I'm at home. I like to get in the zone of the sounds of cooking—the way certain oil crackles, or just a knife hitting a cutting board. It’s like Einstürzende Neubauten.

I also just tap incessantly and involuntarily on everything in the kitchen. I have certain “fuck I’m stressed” songs that get released through my fingers when the restaurant is really busy: the theme song to the first Police Academy movie, “Prescott (Homecut)” by Breadwinner, “Love Und Romance” by the Slits, and definitely “Ether Rag” by Man Is the Bastard. If I was to ever play “Ether Rag” for my sous chef Kim she would be like, “So that’s the fucking song!”

Pitchfork: Fancy Desserts is not not a typical cookbook—there are flyers, a foreword by Steve Albini, an essay from Ian Svenonius. The first photo we see is one of you holding a cake with the Misfits skeleton on it. Did you know from the beginning that you wanted the book to take this form?

BH: The book came about very organically. The final group that worked on it included [designer] Tamara Shopsin, [photographer] Jason Fulford, [editor] Chris Cechin, and myself. It was very much a collaborative effort. We all sort of hated each other at certain points but came together to make it work, just like being in a shitty punk band. Or at least most of the bands I’ve been in. My current band C.R.A.S.H. is the exception, we all really like each other.

Pitchfork: In his foreword, Albini writes: "They say all arts aspire to music, but that's a con. Music wishes it was food… No song, no painting can come close to a perfect meal with friends… It is the only art without which we die.”

BH: In the liner notes of the Reachout International Records cassette comp (The End of Music) As We Know It, Albini refers to Jad Fair of Half Japanese as “god, and therefore infallible.” When I read that in 1988 in my mom’s basement in Towson, Maryland, I knew that if I ever wrote a cookbook I was going to get Albini to do the foreword.

Pitchfork: The book's more of a memoir than a lot of memoirs I've read. You get such a good sense of you has a person, and with each recipe we find out more about you. Did you intend for it to also be an autobiography?

BH: I just wrote what I know. I also really wanted to tell the whole story, not just the “I AM SO AWESOME I AM A GENIUS CHEF NO ONE HAS EVER DONE THIS BEFORE” vibe you get from 95 percent of cookbooks written by chefs. That’s why I included failures, thieveries, embarrassments, and fuck ups. I also wanted to make sure to give proper credit to all the folks that work for me and with me. Restaurant cooking is a collaborative affair.

Pitchfork: I liked this insight from you in the book: "A large part of the joy of cooking is witnessing the perfection of nature." What do you mean by that?

BH: It’s my mission as a cook to source the best possible shit and then not fuck it up. That’s Italian, man. The less I have to do, the more I am stoked. When holding a perfect peach or tomato in your hands at the greenmarket—maybe there’s still dirt on it and it has a bruise because it is so fragile and has never been inside a fridge—you tremble and get all nervous and think, “What can I do to respect this thing and present it to a hungry stranger?” That’s working in a restaurant. That’s hospitality. I want every plate of food I send out to scream to the guests: “Holy shit, this is so fucking delicious, you gotta try this.”

Pitchfork: In your section on ingredients, you say that "the economic and social impact on source producers of chocolate is usually pretty devastating." Can you talk about this side of cooking—cooking responsibly?

BH: I believe that you cannot have listened to Fugazi’s “Burning Too” thousands of times and not source responsible chocolate and vegetables, and shop at places like The Strand and Kitchen Arts and Letters. I’m just doing what Ian and Guy told me to do.

Pitchfork: How did you decide on the recipes for the book?

BH: It’s all stuff I make at work, or at past work venues. The recipes in Fancy Desserts are not that important, honestly, even though it is a cookbook. Though they are all totally do-able. Georgia [Hubley] from Yo La Tengo saw an advance copy and she called it “infinitely entertaining, which is great because I have no intention of trying to prepare any desserts.” That made me very happy. I have many favorite cookbooks that I find totally inspirational but have never cooked from.

Pitchfork: In the introduction, there's a mention of that fact that fans of the music you made may never go to a place like Del Posto. What's it been like navigating both worlds, between an essay about a tour with Universal Order of Armageddon followed by a piece on olive oil?

BH: I’ve only ever worked in fancy restaurants, and, for the most part, high-end restaurants are where you get to learn cooking techniques that don’t exist elsewhere. But restaurants like Del Posto are inaccessible to the majority of the population, which, of course, totally sucks. On the other hand, Del Posto is cool because we have a $39 lunch that is the exact same food as dinner, so if you were to come in and just drink NYC tap water—which is totally delicious, I personally never touch bottled or filtered water in NYC—your bill is $39 plus tax. Which makes it accessible to normal people—though, if you talk to someone like Stephen Tanner, he’ll tell you $39 for lunch is highway robbery. He’s a fucking genius, so what do I know?

Pitchfork: In the book, the pairing of the red wine plums recipe and the cover of the Melvin's Bullhead is great. Do you often make those kinds of connections in your head while cooking?

BH: Bullhead is one of my absolute favorite records, and the cover just had to get photographed for the book. Fancy Desserts is absolutely inspired by a Melvins aesthetic. I saw King Buzzo play acoustic shows in July, and it blew my mind. Even without live drums it was terrifyingly heavy. And he told the funniest jokes in between songs. It was almost a religious experience. Plus, duh, there's fruit on the cover, and in the recipe.

Pitchfork: Will people who don't like the Melvins get your cooking?

BH: Doesn’t everyone on the planet love the Melvins?