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" The pop-up restaurant craze that started in Los Angeles has infiltrated just about every major city and a few small towns. One of the movement&amp;#039;s champions, chef Ludo Lefebvre, stars in Ludo Bites America, the finale of which airs this Sunday at 9 p.m. on the Sundance Channel. Cal Fussman will write about him in Esquire&amp;#039;s November issue. You&amp;#039;ve got to try the Bouillabaisse Milkshake. My wife didn&amp;#039;t want to put it on the menu. She thought I&amp;#039;d gone crazy. I love casual food. I love safe food. But that&amp;#039;s not what I want to do in my restaurant. You come to my restaurant and you have surprising new flavor combinations. You can be safe at home. It&amp;#039;s easy to cook with fat. But can you make a good dish with a tomato and a carrot? I grew up in Burgundy. We didn&amp;#039;t need to have Thanksgiving or Christmas to celebrate with our family and friends. That was every weekend. Every day I did my homework in the kitchen while my mom was cooking. You&amp;#039;d she her wash a salad. Cook a chicken. Peel a carrot. She was proud to have a carrot in her hand. You&amp;#039;d see the love in her eyes. Just to look at her was pretty amazing. Respect your roots, but live in the present. When you work at a three-star restaurant for three years it&amp;#039;s always the same food. That&amp;#039;s the problem with Michelin. When a restaurant gets three stars, it becomes scared to put out new food. It wants to keep its three stars. It wants to stay perfect. I never saw cr\u00E8me brulee with bacon. I found that it must be done right. If you have too much fat on the bacon, the cr\u00E4me brulee is going to break. That&amp;#039;s why I take off the fat. I work on a dish for two weeks, and when I get it to where I want, I take it off the menu. Drives my wife crazy. &amp;quot;How can you take it off the menu? People love it. They come and ask for the dish.&amp;quot; I just say, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s finished!&amp;quot;  How it started? One day I was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway and I saw a circus tent. I said to my wife, What if I could do a restaurant circus? I have my tent with my kitchen and go from city to city. It&amp;#039;s like a band on tour. I want to go on tour to play my new dishes for people. We weren&amp;#039;t live for two minutes when Open Table went down. It&amp;#039;s a pretty amazing that Ludo Bites crashed the world&amp;#039;s largest reservation system. When I first created the concept, I thought people would choose three dishes from the menu. But when people realized they might not get a chance to eat it again, they started ordering the whole menu. Sometimes people beg me for the black squid-ink croque monsieur with foie gras. If they want it that much, I&amp;#039;ll do it. At the end of the day I want to make people happy. When I shower, I&amp;#039;m thinking about cooking. When you&amp;#039;re creating a new dish, you&amp;#039;re the first one in the kitchen. My wife is a big part of my success. She does all the jobs I don&amp;#039;t want to do. The payroll. Hiring the staff. I just want to find the best chicken and cook it. Outside of that, leave me alone. She&amp;#039;s given me the freedom to not worry about valet parking. I&amp;#039;m so excited when I see a young kid come to eat my food. Truth comes through the mouth of a kid. Food is about meeting people and sharing the experience.  I&amp;#039;m scared to have my own restaurant because I&amp;#039;m going to be stuck seven days a week in my kitchen. I&amp;#039;m going to be stuck in my cuisine. I need to travel. When I close, I don&amp;#039;t have to worry about paying the rent. I paint, too. The painting influences the cooking. I love Basquiat. The color. The message. When I cook, I really focus on the color, too.  I&amp;#039;m forty years old, cooking for twenty-six years now, and I&amp;#039;m still looking for my style. I love to explore everything. So I really don&amp;#039;t have a style \u2014 but maybe it has to do with exploration. I love risk. Going 130 miles an hour on a motorcycle on the freeway \u2014 one mistake and you can die. I love that sensation. To control your life with your hands is pretty amazing. But now, all the risks I take are with food. We just had twins. I feel like I&amp;#039;m working for something now. I think my kids are going to make my cuisine better. I can&amp;#039;t wait to see my brain in two years. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/interviews/a10827/ludo-lefebvre-interview-6328829/>