Long before Christina Tosi was revered for her outrageous food combinations, she loved making crazy, sometimes gross concoctions in the kitchen of her parents' suburban home. As a teenager she would eat ranch salad dressing with lima beans. Or mayonnaise and brown sugar with Doritos. Even though she was a "picky" eater – living mostly on hot dogs, pizza and Kraft macaroni and cheese until she was 18 – she would reach for whatever was in the cupboard and mix it into her food, never considering that she was shaping her point of view as a future culinary superstar.
On the morning I visit her at the 11,000sqft storefront and warehouse that she took over two years ago in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she's eating her favourite breakfast: a cornflake chocolate chip marshmallow cookie with a cup of coffee. "I just turned 30 and my diet was crazy for the first 27 years of my life," she says, breaking off a piece of cookie. "I was eating a slice of candy bar pie for breakfast, and sometimes for dinner. That's what I loved and craved. Maybe I'd have a piece of cheese in between."
Having reached the point where her body "felt like shit", recently Tosi has begun to moderate her sugar intake, restricting herself to just a single cookie a day, as opposed to the two or three she used to eat before 6am. When asked if she ever needs to detox, she shakes her head in horror. "Detox is having a bowl of cereal before noon but they're not Frosted Flakes."
You wouldn't guess Tosi's diet from looking at her. Her lanky, runner's frame is evidence of a heroic metabolism. Her straight hair is pulled back in a choppy ponytail with a rubber band and her gold stud earrings and single gold bangle stand out against her pale skin. Unflappable and focused, she describes her work ethic as "hardbody", meaning long full days, no excuses, no complaining and never considering the job a chore. It's one reason why, at only 30 years old, she oversees 60 employees as chef/co-owner of Momofuku Milk Bar, bakeries which have five outlets in New York and ship across the US. The other is innovation, with Tosi's sense of adventure recently helping her win a James Beard award nomination for rising star chef of the year. The popularity of the Milk Bar's compost cookies and crack pies is down to her anything goes approach to deliciousness. The cookie contains crisps, ground coffee and mini pretzels. The pie makes use of freeze-dried sweet-corn powder.
Tosi is a protegée of the Momofuku empire's visionary owner, David Chang. Oddly, he initially employed her to write his food safety plan but quickly realised she had more offer. "She's a born leader. I would throw things at her to keep her busy until I realised she needed to be her own boss," he says. "Christina had an insatiable desire to learn. She just gets shit done."
That they are kindred spirits is clear when Chang playfully describes the nature of their relationship, saying: "I'm like her older brother and she's the more successful sister." Then, with genuine sincerity, he adds: "There are very few people who have the freedom to do what they want in the company. She does. I trust her completely."
This is all the more impressive when you learn that, when Tosi was hired, there was no dessert on the menu. For Chang it was a case of "I have these two restaurants – and we're going to grow and it seems like you'd be a good fit." Tosi asked: "What am I gonna do?" And he replied "I don't know, we'll figure it out."
The first thing she made for Chang was a strawberry shortcake for his Ssäm bar. The first Milk Bar opened in November 2008 in Manhattan's East Village, the fifth, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, just three weeks ago. Here in Williamsburg, the exposed brick and concrete floor give the place an industrial feel that's not cold thanks to the intoxicating smell of freshly baked cookies. On the blackboard, items range from franken pie (a gloriously over-the-top composite of two slices of candy bar pie, two slices of cinnamon bun pie, and four slices of the famous crack pie), to cereal milk ice cream with cornflake crunch topping.
Born in Ohio but raised mostly in Virginia, Tosi grew up in a home where she was raised to follow the familiar route to success: good grades, university, solid profession. Even then she was focused and results driven, aiming for straight As, learning Italian and Spanish because it would look good on her college application but not bothering with art, a "wasted class" that was of no use to her path into higher education.
All the women in her family baked – her mum, her aunts, her grandmother. She credits her mother, a managing partner in an accountancy firm, for instilling in her the mental toughness required to be such a self-starter. Her father was an economist who worked for the US department of agriculture's dairy division.
College, in Virginia, was a revelation in food terms. Her voice rises an octave as she remembers a particularly adventurous meal. "One day I thought, I'll have a BLT for lunch. At the time, that seemed very out there to me. Maybe that's part of the interest and excitement for food, it's still somewhat new."
Tosi tried several different paths at college, none to do with food. Having initially studied mechanical engineering she switched to applied mathematics, then spent time in Florence as she thought she might want to be a translator. She just knew she wasn't keen on pursuing a "regular" job. Baking was her hobby but having spent a couple of summers working in a New Hampshire bakery, she moved to New York after graduation to enrol in the French Culinary Institute's pastry arts programme. In her spare time she worked as a restaurant hostess, food stylist and caterer to pay the bills and explore her interests.
FCI alumni include Chang and Wylie Dufresne, chef patron of New York's highly regarded WD-50, which is where Tosi worked, initially offering her services for free, as a pastry chef. Dufresne made his name as one of America's leading exponents of molecular gastronomy, for dishes such as carrot-coconut sunny-side-up, where the carrot and the coconut look just like the white and yolk of an egg. She describes him as "my biggest mentor" and while under Dufresne she honed a sense of adventure without forgetting that experiments need a purpose. "I was a diner there before I was a cook," she says. "I remember the dishes I had that were a hit and the ones that were a miss."
She still goes too far sometimes. A good example being the time she tried out barbecue-flavoured soft ice cream at Milk Bar. She enjoyed it more than the customers did. "I thought summer barbecue flavours would be fun. And I thought it was so delicious. It was meant to be an experience – not that I thought everyone will come in every day for barbecue ice cream."
While we've been chatting, Tosi's BlackBerry rests on the table, just out of reach. She'll have received about 100 emails but doesn't seem anxious or flustered. "I get stressed out about the dumbest things. I'm infamous for focusing on the smaller problems so that they never get to be bigger problems."
One way she deals with pressure is to make sure she always leaves work in a good frame of mind, rather than angry or frustrated by the day's events. If there's a problem, she'll stay as late as she needs to work it through.
Tosi likes to talk about her team and a significant amount of her introduction to the Milk Bar cookbook is devoted to celebrating the individual contributions made by what she calls her "family". She encourages group discussion and she prefers the staff to have their own points of view. She puts her own thoughts in a notebook, which stems from her time at WD-50, where she was handed one along with her apron. And she found herself returning to the notebooks when she started at Momofuku.
When we head downstairs there are about 12 employees in the warehouse kitchen, scooping, mixing and baking. There's a smattering of wool beanie hats, tattoos and interesting facial hair. Everyone seems focused but relaxed. Young, driven and devoted, they're very much in the Tosi mould. One woman is grinding down peanut brittle. At another station, a guy is making cake truffles from scraps. Tosi tells me he's also a mixed martial arts competitor.
Tosi says she is careful when hiring, keen to separate those who only want to work for her because of the hype from those seeking an opportunity to improve their skills and learn something new.
She shows me around. There are two huge refrigerated walk-in freezers, vats of crumbs and crunches, overripe bananas, crack pie filing, all of it in various stages of production. There are giant mixers humming along – a 20-quart, an 80-quart, and two 140-quart mixers. She points out a small group she calls the "et cetera" team – their job being to do anything and everything that might be required.
Once a month, there is a team building activity such as movies or ice skating. Courtney, the kitchen operations manager, is 31 and making the team meal that day – cold sesame noodles with kimchi-kale slaw. She came to New York from Texas and speaks about how much she feels a part of a family.
"Milk Bar is very personal to me," Tosi says, as we walk out towards the store front past giant bags of sugar and flour. "I built it – but it belongs to all of us."
Christina Tosi seems very comfortable being the boss. What's interesting is, she never really thought of herself as creative or artistic. "I have a very sweet tooth and so I think I always saw that as something fun," she says, thinking back. She isn't one to ruminate too much on the past, though, and quickly snaps back to the present. "I mean, at the end of the day, I'm just doing it to eat cookie dough."
