A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great

TO MY WIFE, AMANDA,
AND OUR TWO BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTERS,
STELLA AND ZADIE

I vividly remember my first visit to 403 East 12 Street. As soon as I stepped in the door, I was met with curious questions.

The first was: “It’s really assy, right?”

“Grassy?” I asked.

“No … assy,” Marco repeated loudly, over the bustle of the bar.

It was true. The red wine that Marco had handed me smelled just like a barn. The hints of wet horse ass were unmistakable. This excited me because (a) the Chinon (Bernard Baudry, 2010, Loire Valley) was the best cabernet franc I’d ever had, and (b) I’d finally found a wine descriptor I could understand.

Marco Canora, of course, is co-owner and executive chef of the James Beard Award–nominated Hearth, where we now stood, just inside the entrance. Prior to striking out on his own, he held various positions at Gramercy Tavern and the famed Cibreo in Florence, Italy. He was Tom Colicchio’s right-hand man as the original chef of Craft restaurant, which won a James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant during his tenure.

By the end of the evening, I concluded what many others had: Hearth is the most underrated restaurant in all of New York City.

“Cooking is not hard. Cooking is
not
hard.” Marco repeated this five times during our evening together. “I feel like I’ve pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes as a ‘successful chef in New York City.’ Anyone could do this.”

“C’mon,” I said as I pointed to my vegetable salad, which was ethereal and juicy (not an adjective I use for salads), easily one of the best salads of my life.

He laughed and waved a hand dismissively. “People say, ‘Oh my God! This is amazing!’ Just dress it while the vegetables are warm—it all soaks in. Pour the oil on after the red wine vinegar, and add salt and pepper. Anyone could do this.”

And that’s the beauty of Marco. He can show you how to “pull the wool over everyone’s eyes” in wonderful, ethical ways. Can simple food be elegant? Can delicious food be fast? Can a three-ingredient dish—slapped together in five minutes—taste like it took hours to make? Yes, and, believe it or not, it can all be good for you, even if it tastes like sin.

I was introduced to Marco in 2009 because he’d lost 25-plus pounds experimenting with the Slow-Carb Diet® as described in
The 4-Hour Body.
He’d tweaked and fine-tuned the guidelines to complement his incredible culinary skills. It was a formidable combination … and a delicious one. He went from a size 40 waist to a size 35 waist without ever being hungry or bored.

But Marco’s not rigidly dedicated to one “diet,” per se.

Marco has cherry-picked his favorite aspects of many books over the years, testing it all in his kitchen and—more important—with
his stomach. He’s added his own inventions, turned a few things upside down, put a twist on the classics, and created what you now hold in your hands: a guide to making masterpieces without being a master.

Marco is a pioneer, and I’ll recommend that you follow in his footsteps. In the wise words of Bruce Lee: “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”

You are in great hands. Enjoy the ride.

Pura vida,

TIM FERRISS

author of
The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body
, and
The 4-Hour Chef

I’ve been a professional chef and cook for twenty years, the last sixteen of them in New York City. I’m a lifer, and I love it. But being a chef means crazy hours and even crazier eating habits. There’s no such thing as “listening to your body” when you’re a chef in a professional kitchen in New York. Awareness of my health and eating habits did not possess an iota of my brain space.

This is what a typical day for me, a working chef, used to look like: I wake up at 10 a.m. and hit the coffee. I don’t feel hungry for breakfast because I was out last night, after dinner service, eating and drinking with chef buddies until 2 a.m. Coffee is my sustenance until I get to the restaurant in the afternoon—and that’s when I start in on the bread. Loads of fresh bread arrive daily, so I swipe a heel of bread and continue picking at it for a few hours. Now it’s time for a cigarette. I started smoking at age nineteen, but never considered myself a hardcore smoker. As long as my first cigarette isn’t until the late afternoon, I’m doing all right. So, it’s now 4:30 p.m. and, if you’ve added it up, the only thing I’ve put in my body is the questionable trinity of coffee, bread, and cigarettes.