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" Last night, chef Rick Bayless was not at his famous restaurant in Chicago, Frontera Grill. Instead he was working a catering gig for two of his former regulars, the Obamas \u2014 a state dinner at the White House in honor of Mexican president Felipe Calderon. Bayless&amp;#039;s four-course meal included Wagyu beef, herb green ceviche, and toasted marshmallows \u2014 and despite the performance from Jay-Z and Beyonc\u00E9, the real main event was in the kitchen where, for the record, Bayless didn&amp;#039;t tweet. We talked to him at 6 A.M. the morning after, when he was on his way to the airport. ESQUIRE: How are you holding up? RICK BAYLESS: I&amp;#039;m a little worse for wear, I have to admit that. ESQ: We&amp;#039;re assuming you raided the famous White House garden for ingredients before the meal. What did you find? RB: Well, what they had in the garden was some arugula that was really pretty, so those are the greens that we used. ESQ: Did you pick it yourself? RB: Yeah, we went out there and we picked arugula. We also got radishes that were used on the first course. ESQ: What was the most surprising thing about the White House kitchen? RB: I kind of expected all the procedures, but what really surprised me is how much food they can produce in a small space. It&amp;#039;s extremely well organized \u2014 but it&amp;#039;s not a large kitchen. You would think, hearing about state dinners and things like that, that they would have an awfully large kitchen, but they don&amp;#039;t. ESQ: Is there one thing you wish you could&amp;#039;ve made, but didn&amp;#039;t? RB: No, I got to make my mol\u00E9 \u2014 that was the one thing that I really wanted to be able to put on the plate. I had no idea if they would ever think about anything like that for a state dinner. Because you know, it&amp;#039;s Mexico&amp;#039;s most famous dish, and its most complex dish. But it&amp;#039;s also a bold flavor, and I didn&amp;#039;t know if, at a state dinner, you had to tone everything down \u2014 and they went for it.  ESQ: What&amp;#039;s the secret to your mol\u00E9? RB: You can&amp;#039;t cut any corners. And it doesn&amp;#039;t come together quickly. I spent about seven hours making that pot of mol\u00E9 two days ago, and that&amp;#039;s really what it takes. Of course you&amp;#039;ve got to get the right ingredients. They&amp;#039;re not used to making those kinds of things in the White House, so I was concerned about whether they would know good quality from bad quality. So I sent them a care package of all the different specialized ingredients. And they got it.  ESQ: What went wrong at the dinner? Something always goes wrong. RB: Things cannot be exactly perfect in the back \u2014 but nothing ever doesn&amp;#039;t go right at the dinner itself. They have every detail worked out. And I have to say, in this dinner, nothing went wrong. I mean, we were making these little jellies out of hibiscus tea, which adds almost a kind of tangy cranberry flavor \u2014 it was a garnish for our main course. And they got us this gelatin that we&amp;#039;d never worked with before, and the little jellies didn&amp;#039;t ever set up. We had to remake them twice before we got them to do what we wanted them to do. But we started making them two days ahead to make sure that they would come out right. No one ever would have known. ESQ: Who was the best dressed? RB: I had almost no time out on the floor, but the entire time that I was out there I was looking at Mrs. Obama. I have to say, she looked stunningly beautiful. Her hair was really beautiful, and she had this gorgeous blue dress on. I have no idea who the designer was, but it was really stunningly beautiful. I think she&amp;#039;s a stunningly beautiful woman anyway, but she looked particularly beautiful last night.  ESQ: What did the president have to say about the meal? RB: They were regular customers at our restaurant in Chicago. He said afterward that it reminded him of being home, and that it was just as good as ever. RELATED STORIES: Wolfgang Puck on Cooking at the Oscars How to Crash More Than a State Dinner Bayless and Other Top Chefs on the Best Fast Food in America "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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