How to find - and feed - your passion, by Danny Meyer

This episode explores how pivotal experiences can shape one's passion and career path, particularly through the lens of renowned restaurateur Danny Meyer and his culinary discoveries.

1. Early experiences can deeply influence one's career and passions.
2. The concept of "sprezzatura" highlights the beauty in simplicity and effortlessness in culinary arts.
3. Discovery and attention to detail are as nourishing as the food itself.
4. Cultural experiences can transform how one perceives and appreciates everyday life.
5. Mindfulness can enhance the appreciation of simple joys and discoveries.

1: Introduction to the Episode

Anya Profumo introduces a rerun of a popular episode, setting the stage for Danny Meyer’s story.
Anya Profumo: "This is an opportunity for us to share the content you've told us you love as we rest, recharge, and plan for the future."

2: Danny's Early Culinary Discoveries

Danny Meyer describes his first eye-opening trip to Rome and its impact on his culinary perspective.
Danny Meyer: "That was the first time I ever went to Rome, and I remember on the actual day of my birthday having a twelve course pasta tasting dinner."

3: The Principle of Sprezzatura

Meyer elaborates on "sprezzatura," a key concept in his philosophy of food and hospitality.
Danny Meyer: "Sprezzatura is what happens when the food... comes across as having been effortless."

4: Reflection and Mindfulness Prompts

Host Rohan uses Meyer’s experiences to introduce mindfulness techniques, inviting listeners to engage with their present environment.
Rohan: "What little things can you notice right now around you, even if they seem familiar?"

1. Explore Local Food: Visit local eateries to experience new cuisines and cultures.
2. Practice Mindfulness: Use everyday activities as opportunities for mindfulness, noticing small details.
3. Embrace Simplicity: In cooking and daily tasks, focus on quality and simplicity over complexity.
4. Reflect on Early Experiences: Consider how past experiences have shaped your interests and career.
5. Cultivate Sprezzatura: Approach tasks with a balance of effort and ease, appreciating the process as much as the result.

Restaurateur Danny Meyer takes us back to where it all began for him: a family trip to Europe and a simple plate of pasta. That memorable meal sparked a lifetime practice of discovery that continues to feed his creativity and his soul.
If this episode resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you. Please take a moment to share your reflections by rating and reviewing Meditative Story in your podcast player. It helps other listeners find their way to the show, and we’d be so grateful.

Each episode of Meditative Story combines the emotional pull of first-person storytelling with immersive music and gentle mindfulness prompts. Read the transcript for this story: meditativestory.com

People

Danny Meyer

Content Warnings:

None

Anya Profumo
Hi listeners. I'm Anya Profumo, a member of the meditative story team. Over the next several weeks, we are going to run some of your favorite episodes from the meditative story library. This is an opportunity for us to share the content you've told us you love as we rest, recharge, and plan for the future. Please enjoy.

Now onto the show.

Danny Meyer
These early trips are filled with delight, which continues over the course of my travels. The delight is always connected to discovery, and often, in my case, the discovery is connected to things I get to taste.

It doesn't have to be fancy food. It can be utterly simple and cheap. Every time I taste something delicious, what fascinates me is who came up with the idea? What can I learn about it? What does it say about the people who made it?

Rohan
There's so much to the culture of food that makes me feel alive. How it grows, how it brings people together, food's ability to express our identity, community, creativity, our values. In today's episode, world famous restaurateur Danny Meyer takes us back to where all began for him, a family trip to Europe, which opened his young eyes to what the experience of eating food together could be like. In this series, we blend immersive first person stories with mindfulness prompts to help you restore yourself at any time of the day. I'm Rohan, and I'll be your guide on this episode of meditative Story.

From time to time, we'll pause the story ever so briefly for me to come in with guidance for a deeper connection to the story and what's happening in your own experience. As you listen, the body relaxed, the body breathing. Your senses open, your mind open. Meeting the world.

Danny Meyer
Just before my 12th birthday, my dad, who was in the travel business back in St. Louis, found himself negotiating to lease two different hotels in Rome. The good news for me and my family was that his negotiations were taking place not only during our two week spring vacation, but also during my 12th birthday.

That was the first time I ever went to Rome, and I remember on the actual day of my birthday having a twelve course pasta tasting dinner.

It was a revelation to me. A complete revelation.

Just the discovery of all these flavors and foods and people and places that I had never experienced growing up. The next day, my dad took us all to a famous old restaurant in Trostevery called dameo pataka. Immediately it hits me. The garlicky wafts of tomato sauce, the warm laughter around the tiny tables. All of my senses are suddenly awake because I've never seen a restaurant like this.

And I've never had food like this. There was the pasta, of course, and the platters overflowing with artichokes. I had had artichokes back home in St. Louis. You know, the big round ones which my mom would sometimes boil to death, the leaves then dipped into melted butter.

But I'd never seen these long artichokes fried and smashed into karchoviala judea. And the roast baby lamb abacchio with its odd cuts and tiny bones that are so succulent.

Rohan
What a place and what a meal. Can you imagine sitting there at young Danny's table? What would most capture your attention? Smells. The tastes, the spectacle.

Danny Meyer
It's an entirely different world from what I know growing up in St. Louis. Back home, I'm used to the flavors of the American Midwest, the mellow experience of growing up there as a kid in the 1960s. A somewhat repetitive culinary experience. Think curbside burgers, frozen custard, St.

Louis style pizza topped with proville cheese, which is basically a lot of different cheeses combined to the point where it doesn't really taste like cheese at all. But in Rome, everything tastes exactly as you'd hoped it would. And the food in Rome was the great discovery of my life. I would go on to visit Europe every few years as a kid, and now, as often as possible as an adult.

These early trips are filled with delight, which continues over the course of my travels.

The delight is always connected to discovery. I've come to believe that this sense of discovery can be as nourishing as the food itself. But discovery means different things to different people. For some people, discovery is about seeing something unexpected. For others, it's about doing something that they didn't know they were capable of.

In my case, the discovery is connected to things I get to taste. My passion for food is the doorway that connects me most deeply every time I taste something delicious. What fascinates me is who. Who came up with the idea? What can I learn about it?

What does it say about the people who made it?

I'll never forget the first time I finally figured out that almost every roman trattoria has the exact same pastas on the menu, and every one of them is related. There's the cacio e pepe, which is simply spaghetti with pecorino cheese, olive oil, and lots of black pepper. Then by simply adding guanciale, the bacon that comes from the cheek of the pig, it becomes spaghetti alla gricia. Or by adding eggs, that same exact recipe becomes spaghetti alla carbonara. And if you omit the eggs and add tomato sauce instead.

You get spaghetti alla matriciana, four different pastas, all related. What impresses me isn't always the complexity of the idea. Sometimes it's the simplicity.

Something that impacted me from a young age about Italy was the emphasis on ingredients. Great italian cooks really cherish and respect their ingredients. A little olive oil and salt doesn't provide much disguise if the tomato itself isn't perfectly sun ripened or if the basil isn't fragrant. I remember a spaghetti a la carbonara melanzani a la parmigiana vongole veracci, the tiny clams that would open just as they were kissed by the garlic, olive oil and spaghetti with which they were meant to marry. All so simple and unadorned.

One of the things I discovered about myself in Rome that I prize wherever I find it, is an italian word called sprezzatura.

Sprezzatura is what happens when the food or the painting or the athletic endeavor or the architecture comes across as having been effortless. And yet the quality belies that.

In other words, you can dig into a bowl of pasta that is so amazing and makes you so happy, and you know how much work must have gone into it, and yet you look at that bowl of pasta, and it appears to be effortless. That's sprezzatura. Today, that very ethos informs everything I do. How can this feel more timeless? How can the dining room be a little less designed, the dessert a little less composed?

It's a mindset of being understated, pared back, letting the fundamentals shine. It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing that more is better. But whenever I find myself thinking that way, I try to remind myself of the simple bowls of pasta that I first discovered in Rome, and that little things can make all the difference.

Rohan
What little things can you notice right now around you, even if they seem familiar? Can you see, hear or feel them with real freshness? There can be so much joy to being a tourist wherever you are.

Danny Meyer
In Rome. I also discovered the way the restaurant itself can transform a meal. The earthy terra cotta floors, the checkered tablecloths, domed brick ceiling, and a warm glow of table lanterns. The tables are closer together than I've ever seen in St. Louis.

In the trattorias of Rome, no matter where you sit, you feel the buzzing energy of everyone around you. And it's that energy, the locals, the music of motorcycles everywhere. All around, I find an irresistibly chaotic cacophony, and it almost always leads to a really good meal. There's something about the different kinds of energy that heighten my senses. I feel connected to the people around me.

Still, today there's nowhere I feel more at home or more alive than in a trattoria. I think I learned from these tratterias to pay attention to the tiniest details. I'll never forget how odd it was when I first came to New York and I realized that unlike St. Louis, where I'd grown up, you don't get a little lemon zest with your espresso. And why was it that in New York, unlike Rome, the cappuccino was known for how tall the foam was?

Almost as if someone was trying to create the Matterhorn mountain on top of the cup? And now, today, something that you would also never see in Rome. New York. Places always try to design the foam. So many people go in search of grand revelations.

But I find discoveries everywhere I look, even in the little things, like the foam in my espresso. Italy is still my favorite place to go in search of these tiny discoveries. There's just something about Rome that to this day I feel like I must have lived there in a previous life. I go to the market and smell every single thing that can be smelled. Some people look at me like I'm crazy, smelling everything.

But those same people look to me like characters straight out of a Fellini film. I stop for three or four coffees, even when I don't need coffee. Not because I do that in my real life, but because how can I not? I notice the milk, the cups, the tiny chocolate or treats served on the side. And every time I pass one of those iconic drinking fountains, the ones you see all over Rome, I stop and drink from it like the city itself, like travel itself.

The fountains of Rome rejuvenate me to continue my tour of discovery.

Rohan
We've reached the end of Dany's story. In just a moment. I'll guide you through a closing meditation.

I have to be honest. I had to look up Sprezzatura in the dictionary. It was a new word and idea to me, but I love it. In one place, I saw it translated as studied carelessness, when something has the appearance of having just been thrown together, but actually has been the result of meticulous, skilled work. So italian.

All of which made me wonder what would be the most sprezzatura of meditation techniques. And the one that came to mind right away is one called noting. So thats what were going to try a little bit of now. So lets get ready. If youre sitting sitting comfortably.

If youre standing, standing comfortably, however, your body is seeing if you can let it express the qualities of both alertness and relaxation. Uprightness in the spine supporting alertness. Softness in the belly supporting relaxation and openness. Enjoying. Resting your awareness in the body.

Letting your awareness fill the whole of your body from the touch of your feet on the ground to the top of your head being present. Present in the body. Simple. Whole and here.

And now that we've established ourselves in awareness of the body, we're going to play a little game. And the rules are quite simple. At any one time there'll be a particular aspect of your inner experience which is most prominent, which most stands out, where your attention is drawn. To be interested in what that is and the game is simply to say its name out loud. And if you're not sure what's most prominent, then simply say not sure.

And by definition you're naming what is happening. That might not be clear. So let me do an example.

Tension. Touch, tingling. Planning, thinking, not sure.

Calm.

That's all it is. What were doing is being aware of whats most prominent inside ourselves and saying its name out loud. Nothing more to it, is actually quite straightforward. So do give that a go yourself. And if it doesnt feel right to say the words out loud, just say them internally to yourself.

Ill start again and when I stop, its over to you.

Touch, tingling, not sure, grateful. Calm.

Okay, now you just naming what is happening while it's happening.

That might have felt odd or it might have felt great. Either way, this is one of my favourite mindfulness techniques around. Because if mindfulness is knowing what's happening inside ourselves whilst it's happening, then doing this noting technique is as pure a form of mindfulness as we can get. Okay? Letting your awareness fill the whole body again, noticing the energy that's here, the momentum from having done the exercise, building back our reserves of stability and balance.

And let's give it another go again. I'll start off and then it's over to you. Just naming what's happening in your inner experience, whatever's most prominent. If that's a physical sensation, then naming that physical sensation, if its a mental process, naming that mental process. There are only a few simple rules to keep in mind.

Keep the rhythm going nicely so that your mindfulness is good and constant. If youre thinking about dinner, the thing you should note is thinking rather than dinner. Since what is happening is the thinking, not the dinner. And if youre not sure whats happening, then just note not sure and youll be right oh, and have fun again. I'll start you off tingling?

Not sure. Relaxation?

Itching? Amusement?

Thinking? Now over to you.

Nicely done. I hope that was fun, and I also hope that you can see why I think it's a technique of real sprezzatura, because while deceptively simple on the outside, it belies the fact that what you need to do to make it happen is a really strong foundation in mindfulness and an alive and alert mind.

You might have really connected with this technique, or it might not have worked for you this first time around. That's totally normal. If you do like it, remember it's entirely portable. Every moment is a chance to note what's happening inside. Every moment is another stop on your tour of discovery.

Unidentified Speaker
On behalf of the team at Meditative Story, thank you for spending time with us today. We love creating the show for you, and if the show serves you in a meaningful way, we'd love to hear from you. Would you take a minute right now to write us a review in your podcast app? When you leave a review, it really inspires our team, and we're a group who derive so much energy from understanding how meditative story impacts you. It's also a way for you to pay it forward by helping others discover the show.

So if leaving a review speaks to you today, we'd really appreciate it.

Rohan
Meditative story is a wait what? Original in partnership with Thrive Global, the show is produced at the studio Inside Sy Partners in New York. Our executive producers are Derin Triff, June Cohen, Arianna Huffington, and Daniel Cats. Our producer is Sabrina Fahey. Our supervising producer is Jai Punjabi.

Our curator is Carrie Goldstein. Original music and sound design is by the Holiday brothers. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Anne Sachs, Juliana Stone, Summer Matais, Monica Lee, Madison Odenborg, Lindsay Benoit Oconnell, Libby Duke, Smrithi Sinha, and Sarah Sandman. And I'm Rohan Gunutiliko, creator of the Buddhafi Meditation app and your host.

Visit meditativestory.com to find the transcript for this episode. On the next episode of meditative story.

Unidentified Speaker
Having an identical twin means being able to see someone who looks so similar to you and to have such an intimacy growing up that you can really see a parallel universe of choices that can be made or taken. I think we all have an imaginary twin, that alternate reality version of ourselves who made a different decision or took a different path or never had that injury or illness. We can all imagine living those alternate lives and occupying those different bodies, and we can either torment ourselves with that or we can embrace and celebrate the creativity and intention that goes into being our unique self cells.