"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, they don’t understand me.”
I go back to that conversation I had with Sam. She’s like, “Do you want me to tell you the hard truth?” I said, “Yeah,” because that’s what I needed. Did I want that? No. I wanted you to tell me how great I was. “You just have to keep fighting and you’re doing such a good job.”
And she’s like, “I’m going to send you an email.” The email that she wrote was the hard truth that someone needed to tell me. If you’re going to open yourself up to that, you have to be willing to accept it. As long as no one’s saying no or stop what you’re doing, I have learned as I’ve gotten older, they want you to succeed.
The only way they can really help you succeed is if you’re able to decide who you are and what you want to be and how you want to be out in the world, which makes up your rule number three.
Rule Three: Define Your Identity
Rule number three: defining your identity. There’s a handful of people in my life that, no matter what they say to me, I value it as improvement.
Even when you feel most alone, if you look around, there are the people that are there for you. And if you’ve done the right thing, you’re not surrounding yourself with a bunch of yes-men. You’re surrounding yourself with people who believe in you.
As you’re building your identity, part of that identity is who’s around you. Who are you with? Who do you align yourself with? You have to have these core values. You have to understand and be able to quantify what it is that you’re trying to do. That’s the hardest thing.
If you can’t articulate it, no one else can articulate it. Once you’re able to articulate what you’re doing and once you figure out who you are, it doesn’t mean you have to play it safe. It means you have a great foundation of who you are, what you want to be, and telling people what that is.
And this allows for your rule number four.
Rule Four: Take a Risk
Take a risk.
Big time.
Great risk, great reward, great failure. I look at things often in spectrums. It’s always like a one to ten.
We’re talking about flavor. Vanilla’s fine. Dead center. I love vanilla, so maybe vanilla is a bad example.
I was talking to a friend about their restaurant, and their restaurant touches on two cuisines. And so I said, “Okay, put one cuisine at one and one cuisine at ten. You’re living in the world of six and four.”
Underwhelming.
Go to eight and two. Build the drama, build the tension. So, when I look at things like taking a risk, if your risk world is between six and four, your reward’s between six and four. I think we’re all running for ten.
I’m at 85 percent. Great. That’s a one-five on the failure side. Eight-and-a-half, if we get that, that’s good.
If you’re already willing to open a restaurant, having investors with no group and no real parachute, you’re probably living in the eight-to-nine world anyway.
One hundred percent.
At some point, you just have to be willing to accept the fact that whatever you’re doing, you need to commit. What you get into something is what you put out. And as far as I’m concerned, the way you do something is the way you do everything. So you may as well go all in on it.
Going all in, committing to the bit, getting people to follow you, especially as you get older—and as the people around you get older—it means it’s not just them, but their families and their livelihood. And there’s just so much life on the line. Your fifth and final rule talks about having this to get to where you want to be in finding your culinary voice. What’s your rule number five?
Rule Five: Confidence
Confidence. No one’s going to believe in you. If you’re already taking the risk, you better be devoted to it.
Oh, yeah.
If we open something, I’m like, “I hope this works. I don’t know. We’re going to see.” Then you think you’re going to have 20 people around you who are looking at you saying, “I’m going to leave whatever I’m going to do to do this because maybe this guy might have a cool idea.” No.
Sometimes it’s false confidence. Sometimes you just have to deliver that. There’s so many times that people are like, “Is this going to work?” And I look at them like, “Fuck, I don’t know, but let’s see. Let’s try.”
I realized that the first time I did a duck press at the table. Before we opened Next, we did some press dinners at Alinea on days we were closed, and I did the duck press with a table from The New York Times. Francis Lam was there, Chicago Tribune was there. It was 20 media people.
And I’d never done a duck press anywhere except the three practice ones in the kitchen. The flavor delivered. It tasted awesome. It took me 45 minutes. I was sweating. I couldn’t talk during it. I was so nervous.
Nick Kokonas was making fun of me during it in front of the press. And I was like, “What are we doing right now? Why are you not supporting this? Nick, cool it.”
Zero confidence. Ultimately, thank God no one wrote about that. But it did build some excitement about what was going to happen.
Because I went through that absolute train wreck of an experience, I figured out to practice enough. So the first time I actually had to press a duck in the dining room of Next, I could deliver it.
That confidence—it didn’t matter that I screwed up my first few at Next. Almost cut my finger off, over-reduced one of the sauces, and broke another sauce. The delivery was strong. The confidence was there. The explanation was there.
Man, that restaurant opened and you couldn’t get a ticket. People were scalping tickets. That place was crazy. What a time.
Closing
Dave, congratulations on everything. Congrats on the award. If people want to come visit either spot or see what you’re up to, what you’re cooking, where can they go?
pasjoli, neighborhood bistro. You get a duck press or you can sit at the bar and get a burger. I’m always back and forth. They’re three blocks apart.
Seline’s the more experiential thing, tasting menu. A little something for everyone.
Next time I’m on the Westside, I’m coming into both. Thanks again for making the time, and great to see you.
Of course. Great to see you too.
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