The co-chefs of the soon-to-be-renamed Bar Tartine, Nicolaus Balla and Cortney Burns, are two of the featured stars of a new documentary about what it means to be an artisan, titled Crafted. The film was made by Morgan Spurlock of Super-Size Me fame, and it was commissioned by the Haagen-Dazs as part of an elaborate marketing campaign, it looks like, for their Artisan line of ice creams.
Burns and Balla have made a name for themselves for their consistent commitment to creating many of their own ingredients, from cheeses to pickles and spice mixtures, in house Ā and they recently won a James Beard Award for their Bar Tartine Cookbook. In the trailer, which comes via Inside Scoop, Burns says that their constant innovation comes with a frequent sense of "I feel like a failure today," and the drive to constantly improve upon their previous work.
The full-length piece is 25 minutes long and can be seen now on Amazon Prime.
The film also features Japanese potter Yuji Nagatani, a seventh-generation artisan at the family-run ceramics studio Nagatani-en; and David Van Wyk and Luke Snyder of Athens, Georga-based arisan knife-makers Bloodroot Blades.