"Great risk, great reward, great failure, but great reward." - Dave Beran James Beard Award–winning chef Dave Beran, the chef and owner of pasjoli and Seline in Santa Monica, joins me to share his Five Rules for Finding Your Culinary Voice. We talk about the importance of self-awareness, learning how to accept the hard truth, and surrounding yourself with people who believe in you enough to tell you what you need to hear. Dave also explains why defining your identity gives you the foundation to take bigger risks—and why confidence sometimes has to arrive before certainty. Together, his rules offer an honest look at the long, complicated, and deeply personal process of discovering who you are through the work you make. What I love about Dave is his continued effort to refine his voice, even after the awards, the acclaimed restaurants, and all the proof that he could simply keep doing what already works. He remains willing to question himself, listen to hard truths, and keep editing until the food feels completely his own. Finding your voice is not a single revelation; it is a lifelong process of paying attention, taking risks, and having the confidence to change when something no longer feels true. Watching Dave continue to do that work reminds me that mastery is not about reaching a final destination—it is about caring enough to keep searching. Introduction Hello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I'm your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with Dave Beran, the chef and owner of pasjoli and Seline here in Santa Monica. He is the recent recipient of Best Chef: California from the James Beard Awards and is here to share his five rules for finding your culinary voice. He talks about the importance of self-awareness, being able to define your identity, and having the confidence to take risks. It is a great conversation for those starting their culinary journey and those looking to refine their cuisine as they move through their career. If you have a moment, please subscribe and rate this podcast wherever you listen. So, let’s get into the rules here on HRN. Finding a Culinary Voice Dave, always a pleasure to see you. Congratulations on everything. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Going back to that first restaurant job you had in Bay Harbor, Michigan, at Latitude, did you have an idea of the chef you wanted to be, and has anything stuck from that time? No, I had no idea. Latitude was cool. That was a fun summer job. I’d just eaten at a couple Chicago restaurants with my dad. Went there and I saw this, like, cool, fancy restaurant that seemed fun. Sure. Started cooking there. I was 19. I just thought it was neat. It was artistic. The food tasted good and everyone who worked there was cool. Yeah. This is a fun place to be. I didn’t know. I had no idea. Chicago is where you made your bones, and you worked at some of the most legendary restaurants, like Tru and Alinea. Now you have your own spots like pasjoli and Seline. What was the moment when your culinary voice started to coalesce? There’s been several points. For me, it’s been a moving target. There’s been a lot of times where I’m like, “Oh, this is me. Oh, now this is me.” Sure. As of recently, it’s the most confident I’ve been in what I’m trying to do. It’s very much ebbed and flowed. At Alinea, there was a point where I would say a quarter to a third of the dishes on the menu were things I’d created. It’s incredible. I thought they were mine. The bubblegum dish at Alinea was a very famous dish. In hindsight, yes, that was my dish, but that dish doesn’t exist without Grant Achatz and Alinea, for that matter. I was very good at doing what I could do through his lens and accentuating his own thought process and, frankly, helping to evolve the thing that he’d created. I get to Next and it’s all new. I hit a window of three menus—Hunt, Vegan, and Kaiseki—where I felt like this was my food. This was my style of menu. Now I look at some of those dishes in hindsight and I think it’s not so much that I had an identity as much as that’s when I felt most confident. They’d created a foundation for me to be creative. That was a framework. I was creating within that framework. I was very quickly reminded that it was not mine when we switched to Steakhouse. Suddenly, I was making a steakhouse menu, and the internal fights around that menu and the personal struggles that I had of, “I’m not going to do a four-course with à la carte,” and ego gets in the way. I realized that my creative evolution was ultimately going to do a disservice to that restaurant because the more in tune with what I was doing, the more in tune with myself and my desires, the more I was moving away from the philosophy of a restaurant that always changed. Then I get to Dialogue, and my food is the self-discovery of, well, what’s really mine and what’s not Alinea and what’s not Next. At the time, I thought it was awesome, but now I look back at it and I’m like, sometimes I look at dishes and I’m like, I just served five dishes that are identical. Here’s a purée with a sauce, with a dollop of something, with this. It was still just an unedited mess. Recognition and Self-Discovery You’ve edited with your new restaurants. You were recently awarded one of the top accolades with the James Beard Awards for Best Chef: California, and not that they’re the end-all, be-all, but feeling that you are the most confident that you have been in your career right now, what does it mean to be recognized? In 2014, I won the same award for Great Lakes. I got Food & Wine Best New Chef, Jean Banchet Awards for Chicago. I won all those that year, too. It was like Avengers, right? Collecting all the rings. At the time, I was king of the world. You couldn’t feed the ego more. It hit a point where it was just expected, like, “Oh, there’s another award and we’re not nominated? Come on, they messed up.” I just took it all for granted. Twelve years later, you get that long-list nomination. LA has not been an easy city. No. Since my time here, we’ve had multiple fires, strikes, protests. COVID. Pretty much every year, a quarter of the year is destroyed. You start to feel like a beaten dog after a while. When we saw that there was a Beard nomination for the long list, I was like, “No way.” You feel forgotten. Then we made the short list. Seline opening was very, very difficult. The restaurant was super confused when it opened. I was confused. I knew what it didn’t want to be, but I didn’t know what it was supposed to be. We were limping along. I hit this really dark point about six to eight months into being open. We’d talked about, “Is this restaurant going to stay open?” Grant Achatz’s wife, Sam, became this major focal point for me as far as helping me understand my own identity. She was just like, “I’d love to help you and tell people about your restaurant, help you get people in, but what’s your restaurant?” It was one of those conversations where I was like, “Well, you’ve been. It’s like this, and I’m like that, and you know my history.” And she’s like, “You can’t say it in a sentence. You don’t know what your restaurant is.” One hundred percent. “No one can talk about it. If they can’t talk about it, they can’t tell their friends to go. No one will ever go because no one will ever understand it, because they can’t digest this concept in a single sentence.” That was like getting hit with lightning. It’s a great lesson. Coming out of that, getting these accolades, it wasn’t about me anymore. It was about the team and the business and knowing that everyone who stuck with us when there were nights when we had four covers—to look around at all of them and say, “Hey, we’ve found our way.” This last year has changed my entire perspective on my self-awareness. It’s no longer the ego. I’d love to say I don’t care about them, but I care about them for very, very different reasons than I used to. The fact that you’ve had such a long journey, both in the kitchen and through personal discovery, makes me so excited for you to share your five rules for finding your culinary voice. You don’t get to where you are without cooking for other people, but then also looking inward, which ties directly into your rule number one. Rule One: Self-Awareness Self-awareness. You’ve got to know who you are. You’ve got to know who you want to be. You’ve got to know what your values are. We talk about that so much in the restaurant. We have our goals, our values, our priorities, straight from talking about how hospitality starts from within, who we want to be, who I want to be. Is the goal to do it for me, or is the goal to do it for the industry, for the team? What is your goal? And that was probably the hardest journey over the last year. For all these years, I’d talked about who I was as a chef and as a person and as a creative. And when it came down to it, when one of my closest friends looked me in the eye and said, “Who are you?” I couldn’t answer the question. Being forced to be inside the kitchen and being forced to be out in the public means that people are going to say what they think about you and your food and your life in a way that people who have a less outward-facing existence sometimes find hard to understand. Your second rule talks about what to do when other people weigh in on your life. What’s your rule number two? Rule Two: Be Willing to Look Outside Yourself It’s the willingness to accept, look outside of yourself, and just say everything you do isn’t just for you. You hit a point of being a creative and you feel alone. “No one understands me. No one understands what I’m doing. I have to do this all by myself.” Finally, someone does offer an opinion and you don’t like it. And you’re like, “Well, the
