Kitchen Secrets

Charlie Ayers thought his bosses—Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—were crazy when they hired him as their 53rd employee in 1999. A Silicon Valley tech start-up hiring a full-time chef? "Some of the best restaurants in Palo Alto are all around you. Go there [for lunch]," the now famous corporate chef remembers telling Page and Brin.

But the founders had a plan: provide their employees with a fast, healthy midday meal to power their minds throughout the afternoon and cut down on time spent in packed lunch lines at neighboring restaurants. Ayers, a chef who had gained a reputation in the San Francisco Bay area by catering for the Grateful Dead and other local bands, hopped on board and not only turned out delicious meal after delicious meal but turned the Google cafeteria into the hottest eatery in the valley.

By the time Ayers left Google in 2005, he was serving more than 4,000 lunches and dinners to Google employees on a daily basis. In addition to engineers and programmers, his meals were eaten by Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Bono.

Now Ayers is revealing the inner workings of his kitchen in his first cookbook: "Food 2.0: Secrets of the Chef Who Fed Google." In addition to lists of his favorite spices, oils, and pantry must-haves—which include beer and chocolate—Ayers lays out step-by-step instructions for nearly 150 recipes, including some Googleplex favorites like "Charlie's Mystical Granola" and "Google Hot Sauce." Ayers took a moment from celebrating his April 21 book launch to speak with NEWSWEEK's Miyoko Ohtake. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Why did you want to write a cookbook?
Charlie Ayers: I'm a restaurateur—and I'm certainly not advocating that people don't go to restaurants—but we rely on restaurants way too much as a society. In other places in the world that's the way it works, because there's no space in a house for a kitchen and people work longer and harder than we do, but here in the U.S. people are lazy and don't cook. And then when they do cook, their pantries have enough chemicals in them to create a bomb. We need to learn to be more self-sufficient and sustainable and less reliant on restaurants.

How did you come up with the title for your book, "Food 2.0"?
It's a play on words because of my association with technology companies in Silicon Valley. Last year one of the tech publications in the Bay Area dubbed me the "Silicon Chef," so we thought "Food 2.0" would be funny.