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profession," he explained. In 1989, he opened Monsoon, a high-end, innovative Asian restaurant in San Francisco. One night he created a recipe for ginger ale as part of a special dinner to promote the publication of a medicinal Chinese cookbook. He toyed around with the recipe, adding ginseng and herbs, and the beverage spawned a sensation among customers. Monsoon was awarded four stars by the San Francisco Chronicle and attracted national publicity when Cost received James Beard Award nominations two years in a row as Best Chef in California. But Monsoon was finished after only three years. "It was ahead of its time," Cost says, "but financially it wasn't great. Restaurants are a tricky business and I'd never worked in one before. I made a lot of mistakes." Having learned a few things, he next helped open a lower- priced restaurant, Ginger Island, in Berkeley. Customers again clamored for his ginger ale—he'd dropped the herbs by this point— both as a nonalcoholic alternative or mixed in cocktails. A restau- rant chain he tried to mobilize in Silicon Valley, Ginger Club, didn't pan out, so he said yes when Richard Melman, founder of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, recruited him for a Chinese restaurant concept, Big Bowl, in Chicago. His ginger ale became a best-selling item there, too. Bottling the Recipe for Success During the dozen or so years Cost spent in Chicago, more than three million glasses of his ginger ale were sold to patrons at several restaurants, far outstripping sales of conventional soft drinks. He investigated bottling it but nothing came to fruition. What proved to be the key was Cost's friendship with Terry Tang, who co-founded the Brooklyn-based noodle and dumpling company, TMI Trading, with his brother, Joseph Tang. The brothers were sup- plying a quarter million dumpling skins a week to Cost and his res- taurant partners in Chicago and went into business selling dumplings made from Cost's recipes at Byerly's and Lund's in the Minneapolis area. Terry Tang believed in the ginger ale's commercial potential and jerry-rigged part of a TMI dumpling factory in Bushwick to make it. Sourcing thousands of pounds of ginger from China, Cost and Tang experimented until they were able to devise a way to make a natural concentrate without extracts or chemical flavorings. "For a long period of my life I was on a plane every two and a half days," Cost said, commuting to Chicago as well as visiting his son, Benjamin, 26, a food writer based in Shanghai. Father and son have also long enjoyed gastronomic travels around the world, "eating all kinds of insects and even wild camel in Australia, which is more steak-like than kangaroo." Eventually, he sold his stake in the food business and left Chicago to move back to New York. His spicy, cloudy, carbonated ginger ale started to be stocked at Dean & DeLuca and some Whole Foods in 2010, and restaurants like Momofuku in New York and the Slanted Door in San Francisco signed on to carry it. Scaling Up and Branching Out By 2014, Cost and Tang were able to move their headquarters to a 20,000 square-foot factory, also in Bushwick, to increase production of the ginger syrup. They work with co-packers in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and California for bottling and canning. Cost is still on the road a lot, attending food shows everywhere from Tokyo to Cologne. He is approaching the three million mile mark as a United Airlines frequent flyer. His base is a two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, which he shares with his new wife, Kavi Reddy, and their one-year- old daughter, Coco. Ruth Reichl, still one of his closest friends, sug- gested he write a new cookbook and call it Feeding Coco. Cost began exposing her to a wide variety of foods after she was four months old. "She's eaten raw oysters and blue cheese and was eyeing uni in Hawaii," he said. "As soon as she got a couple teeth I gave her spare ribs. She even likes liverwurst." Cost believes Coco's diet has made her more active and coordinated and will help her to resist develop- ing allergies or food intolerances. So could a guide to making your baby an adventurous eater be his next book? "I don't see why not," he says, a philosophy of life that has served him well. producer profile Sourcing thousands of pounds of ginger from China, Cost and Tang experimented until they were able to devise a way to make a natural concentrate without extracts or chemical flavorings. His spicy, cloudy, carbonated ginger ale started to be stocked at Dean & DeLuca and some Whole Foods stores in 2010, and restaurants like Momofuku in New York and the Slanted Door in San Francisco signed on to carry it. 92 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE specialtyfood.com Julie Besonen writes for The New York Times and is a restaurant columnist for nycgo.com.