When science and food collide: a conversation with Wylie Dufresne

The James Beard Award-winning chef Wylie Dufresne has been serving up his unique take on classic dishes for over a decade thanks to advancements in technology as well as in the field of molecular gastronomy, a subdivision of food science that explores what happens to the food we cook on a physical and chemical level.

“We realized that we had to go outside of our discipline for the answers to our questions,” says Dufresne. From gluing meat together using enzymes to scrambling eggs inside the shell, Dufresne always pushes himself — and his staff of highly trained cooks — to never stop innovating in the kitchen.

We visited Dufresne at his now legendary restaurant, wd-50, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to see where cooking and science meet. Dufresne talks about his approach to creating compelling dishes, how technology has advanced cooking techniques, and what inspires him to continue exploring.