Adventurous Cooking with Chef Ben Ford

TJ: How did you first get interested in work- ing with food?
FORD: When I was a young child I enjoyed being in the kitchen with my mother. I had to suppress my passion for food for years because I was trying to play baseball professionally. When I was about 20 years old, I had to figure out a second career. I had no formal training, so in 1987, I grabbed a couple of my mom’s kitchen knives, drove up to San Francisco, and got a job in North Beach. Pretty soon after that I was working in Chez Panisse.

TJ: Did you want to become an actor?
FORD: No, acting was never an option. I was fairly adverse to nepotism in my family. I wanted to know what my own achievements in life were. I was a late bloomer and didn’t know myself well enough to even con- sider playing other people. I did the reshoots for my dad and some voiceover work in the new Blade Runner, but it’s not my chosen profession.

TJ: Have you been to Japan?
FORD: I lived there for two brief periods. My dad was doing beer commercials and other things. When I was about 16, we lived in traditional inns in Kyoto and Tokyo. This is when I lost my inhibitions for food and that helped me towards becoming a chef. In Kyoto, our breakfast usually consisted of a fish head soup. My brother and I decided against eating it for the first three days. By the fourth day, we were very hungry, decided to try it and were rewarded! At that time, I decided to become more explorative as far as food is concerned.

The complete article can be found in Issue #276 of the Tokyo Journal. Click here to order from Amazon.