OMC: Where do you get ideas for dishes?

SD: The food that we do is a combination of inspiration from different places. I read everything I get my hands on and we travel and get ideas there, but basically, it's inspiration from product. You see great product and you want to do something with it. Stylistically, I do what I do from my upbringing and my training. It's a combination of my family and what I was brought up eating. I'm Sicilian on my father's side and my mother's side was very German. A lot of inspiration from our food comes from that and my mentors -- like Peter Von Erp (from the Culinary Institute of America).

A lot of times, food I'm doing seems like it's coming out of left field, but it's basically really grounded in that. What his feeling was, as we were working. He'd say 'We're going to do a cold cucumber soup. You go do some research and find five or six different areas that do cold cucumber soup and what you like and don't like.' We'd be at the library, working this out. I'd find one from Turkey, where they do a cold cucumber soup with yogurt and decide to garnish it with shaved ice and walnuts. Then there was one from a different area that might use pomegranates. Another one might be from India, where they are using yogurt and something more spicy. That's where the food came from. That's been my philosophy of food that is really ethnically inspired, but it always has roots in the soil. I don't cross-culturalize my food. I think that things that grow in the soil together go together. Pomegranates and yogurt and walnuts may sound like strange ingredients they work well together. They're growing in the same area and they taste good. They're from the same area.

That's how I do a menu. I don't look at menus. I look at ingredients. I'll say 'I want to do something Turkish.' And, I'll take a whole list of Turkish ingredients and put a menu together.

OMC: Cooking seems almost like composing music. Just about everything has been done and everything we think of as "new" has echoes to something that already has been done.

SD: If you know food history, everything has been done at one time or another. Even things that seem so radically different at this time, like infusion oils, have been done. That was 15th century Florence. It's all there. There are very few original cooks in this country.

OMC: So, where do the ideas come from?

SD: I try to look at something my grandfather may have done. We went to an Italian restaurant about 20 years ago and they had a squid salad on the menu. I had my mind set on what this was going to be -- grilled squid with some nice greens and maybe a real tart dressing. What they ended up serving was little fried squid pieces on top of iceberg lettuce. When I got back to the restaurant, I put on the squid salad I was thinking about. I did a Jalapeno lime vinaigrette and served it with fresh avocado and mango. That was inspired by that dish. But, it wasn't a dish that I had seen anywhere.

I think that's where a lot of the best food comes from. The best food I see and the best ideas are, a lot of times, as a chef you see them and say 'Geez, it was right there. Why didn't I think of it? It's so simple. It's brilliant.'

OMC: You mix a lot of styles in your cooking -- French, Italian, Mediterranean, etc. -- what does American cuisine mean to you?

SD: Years ago, people were trying to define what American cuisine was. People couldn't. It was really this amalgamation of products and techniques that really made no sense. What it has become is chefs using techniques of what they've learned. If they're smart and if they're good, they're using the one thing that they have that is personal to them. That's their experiences from growing up. That's the best food that I've made.

OMC: A lot of people are talking about "comfort food," meaning variations on things like meat loaf, pot roast, macaroni and cheese and things that remind them of childhood. Is that trend going to last?

SD: (Coquette) is the ultimate comfort food restaurant. You take any dish off this menu and it will translate to a Midwestern dinner: roast chicken, meat loaf, steak and fries. It's what someone would cook for a Sunday dinner if their mother or grandmother happens to be French. It's pot roast. It's braised items. It's the comfort level that people coming in here don't have to feel that they have to order an entrée. They can sit at the bar or come in and have a salad and split a sandwich.

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