Chefs

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares199 Views

    The Eleven Madison Park Hospitality Guru Who Worked on ‘The Bear’ Opens Up

    by

    Will Guidara, who has a co-producing and writing credit on Season 3, talks about the power of surprise and the calling of restaurant work.Until Season 3 of “The Bear,” only viewers who understood restaurant hospitality at its highest levels could spot the Will Guidara Effect.Mr. Guidara was the Paul McCartney to chef Daniel Humm’s John Lennon at Eleven Madison Park, the acclaimed New York City restaurant they once co-owned. During their 13 years together, the staff’s signature was delivering to diners small delights and outrageous surprises based on guest research and bits of overheard conversation. . He once made a quick run to buy a dirty-water dog that Mr. Humm cheffed up with quenelles of sauerkraut and relish and delivered it to a table of food-focused tourists who had mentioned they were leaving town without tasting a New York hot dog.Mr. Guidara’s book “Unreasonable Hospitality” first made a cameo in the show’s second season. The episode, called “Forks,” traces the evolution of the sweet but troubled Richie Jerimovich (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who had been running the sinking Chicago sandwich shop that is at the center of the show. When it transforms into a fancy restaurant called the Bear, Richie finds his calling as a hospitality professional after he puts on a suit and spends a week learning service at a restaurant with three Michelin stars.While he’s training, a waiter overhears a family say they are bummed to leave Chicago without trying deep-dish pizza. Richie runs to Pequod’s pizza shop, brings back a pie and the chef, with a cookie cutter and some micro basil, turns it into a modernist dish that Richie delivers to the astonished guests. It’s pure Guidara.Richie learns from Mr. Guidara’s best-selling book “Unreasonable Hospitality.”FXThis season, Mr. Guidara was listed as a co-producer and given a story credit on an episode titled “Doors.” Sharp-eyed viewers noticed his “WG” initials when Richie texts someone about a restaurant closing, and he has a significant cameo in the season finale, delivering an impassioned speech about hospitality that begins, “There’s a nobility in this.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Did You Find These Easter Eggs in ‘The Bear’ Season 3?

      by

      Subtle, and not so subtle, culinary references are sprinkled throughout the show’s third season.In its third season, “The Bear,” a television show known for its dedicated hyperrealism, did not disappoint fans looking for real-world culinary references. As Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and their team of former sandwich professionals hustled for a Michelin star or two at their newly opened fine-dining spot, Easter eggs dotted the show. We’ve compiled a short list, with help from restaurant industry professionals, of the most true-to-life nods and hidden surprises:In certain corners of Reddit, it is rumored that the entire show is loosely based on the life of the chef Curtis Duffy, an owner of Ever restaurant in Chicago. But, while the creators have dined at his restaurant, “If they were studying me, I didn’t know it,” he said.The photos of the restaurant critics posted in the Bear office are of actual people, including the New Yorker writer Naomi Fry, the “How Long Gone” podcaster Chris Black and Sue Chan, who runs the culinary events and marketing agency Care by Chan. On the show, Marcus, the pastry chef played by Lionel Boyce, makes a “caviar sundae.” A similar dish was served at the renowned, now-closed restaurant 108 in Copenhagen, a culinary hotbed to which “The Bear” has referred numerous times.In flashbacks to Carmy’s time at the French Laundry, Thomas Keller’s restaurant in the Napa Valley, a sign beneath the clock reads, “Sense of Urgency.” “That sign sits under every clock in every restaurant Thomas Keller has,” said Nick Fitch, a co-owner of Alston Hospitality Group who spent 12 years working the dining room at the French Laundry and Per Se.The Pilot G2 Gel Roller Pen, with a .07-millimeter tip that Carmy uses to furiously scribble throughout the season (and to write his list of “non-negotiables”) caught the eye of Greg Ryan, a co-owner of Bell’s in Los Alamos, Calif. who worked in the dining rooms at Per Se and the French Laundry for more than five years. “When I was an expediter, those were just the pens you had,” he said. “They work well on receipt paper, don’t smudge, have a fine tip and write super-smoothly.”Much has been made of Mr. Keller’s chicken-trussing demonstration — “If you ask him his favorite dish, he’ll say roast chicken,” said Mr. Fitch — but a photo of his handprint cast in concrete also makes an appearance in the season’s first episode. According to Mr. Fitch, the handprint was initially in the kitchen at the French Laundry but was extracted during an extensive renovation and moved outside, along with handprints from Corey Lee, a former French Laundry chef de cuisine, and Claire Clark, a former pastry chef at the restaurant.Joel McHale, who plays Chef David, said on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” that he was “portraying” Mr. Keller. “I don’t think he’s as awful as I was, but he does whisper at his employees,” Mr. McHale said. Others have speculated that the character is based on Daniel Humm, the chef at Eleven Madison Park. Will Guidara, a producer on “The Bear,” was a business partner of Mr. Humm’s until the two had a tense public split. Mr. McHale said in a GQ interview this week that “David is apparently based on Thomas Keller and Daniel Humm,” and added, “There wasn’t any material. I’ve never met them.”In Episode 2, Carmy calls a dish of sea bass topped with potato chips a “Boulud nod,” as in Daniel Boulud, the renowned chef who created crisp paupiettes of sea bass in Barolo sauce. That dish uses thinly sliced potatoes as a crust for a skinless fillet, and Mr. Boulud has in turn credited a mullet dish made by Paul Bocuse as his inspiration.The tip-versus-service-charge conversation among the Bear’s staff touches on a hot-button issue that’s playing out all over the country. Many restaurateurs, most famously Danny Meyer, have tried to create a better system, with mixed results. In California, a recently passed law seemed to make restaurant service charges illegal (as part of a bid to reduce hidden fees), but then a second bill was passed, allowing restaurants to keep those fees if they are presented clearly.In Episode 7, Chef Marcus asks Carmy about a photo of Mr. Keller with Mr. Boulud and the chef Nobu Matsuhisa as much younger men. All three went on to become world-renowned chefs. Mr. Matsuhisa has opened restaurants on five continents, and popularized the now-famous dish of miso black cod at Nobu, his restaurant in TriBeCa.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      For Carla Hall, It’s Been a Bumpy Climb to a ‘Top Chef’ Life

      by

      Carla Hall’s tarot card reading was running long. Astrology, numerology, psychics, the Chinese zodiac — she’s open to all manner of metaphysical messaging.I slipped off my shoes in the foyer of her century-old house in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, D.C., out of respect for a recent million-dollar gut renovation. Then I went to wait in her airy kitchen, which happens to have the most expertly arranged, hand-labeled spice drawer I have ever encountered.Ms. Hall finally bounded down the stairs with news from the reading. “Oh, my God,” she said. “It was so good. All stars point to ‘this is your year.’’’Indeed, Ms. Hall seems to be everywhere. She’s selling $88 carrot cakes and nesting bowls decorated with okra flowers from her Sweet Heritage line on QVC. She made croquettes from Doritos at the Super Bowl’s Taste of the N.F.L. event. She is luminous in a recent People magazine spread marking her 60th birthday, which arrives in May. (She’s a Taurus.)And of course, she’s on TV, the medium that made her a food star almost from the moment she was introduced to the world as “kooky Carla” in the fifth season of “Top Chef” in 2008. This year, she’ll judge Food Network baking championships, appear on “Beat Bobby Flay” and serve as a guest judge when “Top Chef” returns in March.Ms. Hall shot to fame as contestant who meditated regularly and sang a lot on the fifth season of “Top Chef.”Giovanni Rufino/Bravo/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Gordon Ramsay Isn’t Going Anywhere

      by

      With a new season of his series “Next Level Chef,” reality TV’s most enduring antihero still reigns supreme. How long can he keep it up?Gordon Ramsay insists he never wanted to be the bad boy. His image as the brash, bellicose chef and restaurateur, as the master of the culinary meltdown, was, he said, largely a matter of getting off on the wrong foot.Ramsay was introduced to British viewers on “Boiling Point” (1999), a five-part series on Channel 4 chronicling his turbulent efforts to open his first restaurant. At around the same time, BBC Two launched “The Naked Chef,” a breezy, upbeat cooking show starring the young chef Jamie Oliver. The two shows, and the two chefs, could hardly have seemed more different.On the one hand, you had Ramsay, a surly perfectionist, firing a waiter for drinking water in view of customers. “And then literally at the same time, on another channel, there was Jamie,” he recalled in an interview last week, “this floppy-haired Essex boy, sliding down the banister doing one-pot wonders.”“The nation fell in love with him,” Ramsay said. Whereas with himself, he added, “the nation wondered what the hell was going on.”Ramsay’s explanation may not entirely account for his enduring infamy as an explosive TV tyrant — it wasn’t Oliver, after all, who named Ramsay’s signature series “Hell’s Kitchen,” and he hardly forced Ramsay to bludgeon countless chefs and restaurant owners with colorful jeremiads for the past 25 years on air. But that Ramsay still brings up old rivalries when discussing his reputation is revealing, a glimpse of the competitive intensity that has been crucial to his continuing success.That competitiveness is one reason that the host of roughly two dozen shows over the years, including “Next Level Chef,” returning on Sunday for its third season on Fox, still devotes so much of his down time to watching other food shows. It’s why, during the pandemic lockdown, he threw himself headlong into social media. And it’s also why, at 57, Ramsay has no intention of calling it quits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Michael Chiarello, Chef and Food Network Star, Dies at 61

      by

      His culinary empire included several restaurants, an olive oil company, a winery and a retail business with a robust catalog.Michael Chiarello, a hard-working, TV-ready chef from California’s Central Valley whose culinary prowess and intuitive knack for marketing helped define a chapter of Italian-influenced Northern California cuisine and the rural escapism of the Napa Valley lifestyle, died on Friday in Napa. He was 61.His death, in a hospital, resulted from an acute allergic reaction that led to anaphylactic shock, said Giana O’Shaughnessy, his youngest daughter. The cause of the allergic reaction has not been identified.Mr. Chiarello was a member of a generation of Northern California chefs who by the 1980s had freed themselves from the conventions of continental cuisine. They swapped olive oil for butter when they served bread, and they used seasonal produce and locally made cheese and wine long before the term “farm to table” became a menu cliché.He would later get caught in the #MeToo movement, when two servers filed a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2016 against him and his restaurant company, Gruppo Chiarello. The case was settled out of court, but his reputation was tarnished and television opportunities dried up.Michael Dominic Chiarello was born on Jan. 26, 1962, in Red Bluff, Calif., in the Sacramento Valley, and raised surrounded by almond trees and melon fields 200 miles south in Turlock, a farming town built on the rich soil not far from Modesto.He was the youngest child of a couple with roots in the Calabria region of Italy. He credited his mother, Antoinette (Aiello) Chiarello, for his earliest culinary lessons. His father, Harry, was a banker who suffered a debilitating stroke when he was in his 40s.“We never had much money and always had to scrape by,” Mr. Chiarello told The St. Helena Star in 2006. “We foraged for our food. The kitchen table was our entertainment. If we had pasta with porcini mushrooms, we’d talk about how we picked them. How wet and rainy it was that day, or how the truck broke down. There was a story to all the food we brought home, and it made everything taste even better.”By 14, he was working in a restaurant in between wrestling practice and classes at Turlock High School. By 22, he had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and Florida International University in Miami, where he earned a degree in hotel and restaurant management.Even though he was starting to receive national attention for his cooking — he opened his first restaurant in Miami in 1984 and was named Food & Wine magazine’s chef of the year in 1985 — his father wasn’t pleased.“When I decided to be a chef, it wasn’t what it is today. It was just a trade, not sexy like today,” he said in the 2006 interview. “I remember my father was concerned about me. One of my brothers is a Ph.D., one an attorney. I was a cook. He’d say, ‘The family came all this way from Italy. He could have done that over there.’”Mr. Chiarello in 2005 after his Food Network show “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello” won a Daytime Emmy Award.Mathew Imaging/FilmMagicMr. Chiarello caught the attention of Cindy Pawlcyn, who had recently been on the cover of Bon Appétit magazine for her restaurant Mustards Grill, a pioneering Yountville roadhouse with a giant wine list where the great winemakers of the era would walk in covered in farm dirt. She was looking for someone to run a new restaurant in St. Helena called Tra Vigne.Mr. Chiarello arrived for an interview wearing a chef’s neckerchief and brimming with ambition.“Michael was a very driven man; there was no doubt about that,” Ms. Pawlcyn said in a phone interview. “Tra Vigne was a good place to start, because Michael was outgoing and exuberant and could be charming on the spot. He met a lot of people there.”Indeed, Robert Mondavi and other top winemakers would become regulars, and guests often included culinary and Hollywood elite, from Julia Child to Danny DeVito.The restaurant was a jumping-off point for Mr. Chiarello’s empire, which would eventually include several restaurants, an olive oil company, a winery and a retail business with a robust catalog.Mr. Chiarello ran the Tra Vigne restaurant in St. Helena, Calif., until 2001. Robert Mondavi and other top winemakers would become regulars, and guests often included members of the culinary and Hollywood elite.Peter DaSilvaHe left Tra Vigne in 2001 to pursue a career in media and merchandise. His first TV show, “Season by Season,” debuted that year on PBS. And he opened NapaStyle, a website and a small chain of retail stores where he sold panini, flavored olive oil and other specialty foods, as well as cookware, table décor and wine from his own vineyard.He jumped to Food Network in 2003 with “Easy Entertaining With Michael Chiarello,” which landed him a Daytime Emmy Award. He would go on to compete on “Top Chef Masters” and was a judge on “Top Chef.”Mr. Chiarello wrote eight books, one of which, “The Tra Vigne Cookbook” (1999), was at one point as popular in Bay Area bookstores as Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential,” which came out shortly after.He was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said the Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him.“He really was a very good cook but also an amazing marketer and merchandiser,” she said, adding that “they didn’t come more charming or handsome.”“Walking through the dining room at Tra Vigne, you could just see the star power,” Ms. Fletcher said, “but there was substance, too. You wanted to eat every dish on his menu.”Mr. Chiarello was one of the first to see Napa Valley as a lifestyle and a brand, said the Northern California food writer and cheese expert Janet Fletcher, who wrote two books with him, including “The Tra Vigne Cookbook.”Chronicle BooksMr. Chiarello jumped back into the restaurant world in 2008, opening the casually elegant Bottega in Yountville. Five years later, he added Coqueta, a Spanish-focused restaurant on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and in 2019 he expanded it to Napa.Sexual harassment claims dogged him. Two servers at Coqueta named him in a lawsuit in 2016, claiming that he presided over a sexually charged atmosphere, touched employees inappropriately and, among other things, made lewd gestures with a baguette.Mr. Chiarello vigorously denied the charges and vowed to fight them. The parties eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.In addition to Ms. O’Shaughnessy, his daughter from his marriage to Ines Bartel, which ended in divorce, Mr. Chiarello is survived by two other daughters from that marriage, Margaux Comalrena and Felicia Chiarello; a son, Aidan Chiarello, from his second marriage, to Eileen Gordon; two brothers, Ron and Kevin Chiarello; and two grandchildren. A company spokesman said that Mr. Chiarello and Ms. Gordon were legally separated and in the process of divorcing when he died.Despite his outsize career, Ms. O’Shaughnessy said, Mr. Chiarello was a family man at heart who wanted to keep his family’s stories alive. He made a point of teaching his children how to make the gnocchi his mother taught him to make when he was 7, and he named various bottlings of wine from Chiarello Family Vineyards after his children.“In the restaurant business I lost a lot of time with my girls,” he said in 2006. “I don’t want that to happen again. I don’t want to be saying anymore that I should have spent more time with my children, more time with my wife. If I get hit by a bus, I don’t want my last thought to be about a wine deal I was doing with Walmart.” More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      On ‘Top Chef’, Kristen Kish Takes Over as Host

      by

      One day last week, a vase spilling over with white lilies and roses arrived in Kristen Kish’s dressing room in Milwaukee, where “Top Chef” is shooting its 21st season.Padma Lakshmi, the model and author who became a household name during the 17 years she hosted the cooking-competition show, had sent them, along with a note: “Break a leg. I’m so proud of you kiddo!”For Ms. Kish, who was so nervous her first day on the set as Ms. Lakshmi’s replacement that she thought she might throw up, the flowers were a balm.“I know my job is to simply be me,” Ms. Kish said, “but I feel like I am not going to be impressive enough to hold my own space and follow in Padma’s footsteps.”Truth is, the aging “Top Chef” franchise, which has had its share of stumbles in an increasingly crowded constellation of food shows, needs her as much as she needs it. At 39, Ms. Kish represents a third wave of chef celebrity, far removed from pioneers like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay, and the generation of tattooed, mostly white kitchen bros who followed.Ms. Kish is a gay Korean adoptee and a proud product of the Midwest. She hits the notes sung by culinary stars before her: She co-wrote a cookbook, opened a restaurant and makes much of her living on camera, a skill she polished on several other shows before landing the “Top Chef” job in July. On social media, she toggles seamlessly between charming brand promotions, food tips and sincere declarations — about love, self-care and even self-doubt — that can border on oversharing.Under all her casual confidence, she says, is a foundation of crushing insecurity.Ms. Kish has been on “Top Chef” as a contestant and judge, and is comfortable on the set in Milwaukee.Lyndon French for The New York Times“I have severe social anxiety and I’m on television, which is wild,” she said. “I know I’m a walking contradiction.”That’s hard to buy when you see her stride onto the set with the command of a model (which she once was). The show’s stylist selected heeled boots and wide pants for her tall, lean body as a way to project authority. She broke into a goofy dance one moment, then hit her mark perfectly the next. The first time she uttered, “Please pack your knives and go” — the chilling phrase Ms. Lakshmi delivered when a contestant was eliminated — the crew applauded.“Kristen is a megawatt,” said Dana Cowin, the former editor in chief of Food & Wine and a “Top Chef” judge for seven seasons. She recently watched Ms. Kish confess her personal fears as she demonstrated how to make Korean-style corn dogs for a rapt audience at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colo. “She was just so vulnerable and open.”If Ms. Kish had a brand, it might be wrapped in millennial pink and laced with the ideals of a generation that values earnestness, diversity and being nice.“She’s been on a huge journey defining how we can be a chef in the post-celebrity-chef era and how we can think about our global community in a bigger way,” said her friend Gregory Gourdet, the Portland, Ore., chef who was both a judge on the show and a finalist.The Heir ApparentIt all started when Ms. Kish won “Top Chef” in 2013.“She is completely a creature of the franchise,” said Francis Lam, a frequent guest host and the vice president and editor in chief of Clarkson Potter, which published “Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques” in 2017. “On some level she can be a little bit of a cipher. People can put a lot on her based on their assumptions.”When Ms. Lakshmi announced that she would not renew her contract as the show’s host and executive producer, Ms. Kish was the clear choice, said Casey Kriley, a chief executive of Magical Elves, the unscripted-production company that created the show. Executives at NBCUniversal, which owns Bravo, the network it airs on, never interviewed anyone else, said Ryan Flynn, a senior vice president.“She checks all the boxes,” he said.Ms. Kish battled Brooke Williamson in Seattle to win Season 10 of “Top Chef” in 2013.David Moir/BravoMs. Kish got word that “Top Chef” wanted her while flying back to the East Coast with her wife, Bianca Dusic, after doing promotional work for a hotel in Thailand.“I was shocked,” she said. “I really wasn’t pushing for this because I never thought it was actually a possibility.”Ms. Lakshmi was the first person she called. “I hope I’ve been a sounding board for her over the last decade,” Ms. Lakshmi wrote in an email. “I’ve made it my mission to mentor young women like her because I didn’t have that coming up.”Ms. Lakshmi, a victim of sexual assault, often spoke out about sexual harassment in the restaurant industry, including accusations against a “Top Chef” winner, and pushed to make the show less Eurocentric.Ms. Kish said that although she will have no problem being blunt if she needs to, she intends to focus on the work, not the politics.“TV is populated by people who love to hear their own voice,” said Hugh Acheson, a chef who made his name with restaurants in Georgia and was a judge on the show for six seasons. “And that isn’t Kristen at all.”Tom Colicchio, the chef who serves as the show’s head judge, said he was excited to have someone new in the mix, especially an experienced chef. “She knows what she’s doing,” he said.Gail Simmons, the show’s other judge and a close friend of Ms. Kish, didn’t think she needed much advice: “The only concern I had was her own self-doubt.”Gail Simmons and Tom Colicchio, Ms. Kish’s new co-workers on “Top Chef,” said they she didn’t need much advice before shooting Season 21.Lyndon French for The New York TimesUnder ControlA precise and focused cook with French and Italian influences, Ms. Kish has long relied on organization to counter her anxiety. Growing up in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., she kept a whiteboard in her room to keep track of her schoolwork, piano lessons and sports. Her older brother, Jonathan, an automotive engineer, gave her a cordless vacuum as a housewarming present when she recently moved to Connecticut with the Australian-born Ms. Dusic. She uses it every day she’s home.Ms. Kish is much looser about what she eats and wears. She prefers hoodies and a ball cap turned backward. Her favorite cosmetic is Carmex. She’d just as soon eat chicken tenders, sour candy and squares of presliced Colby-Jack cheese on a saltine.The Hamburger Helper that brought her joy as a child inspired a pasta dish of curly edged mafaldine tossed with mushrooms and pearl onions that is popular at her Austin restaurant, Arlo Grey.This baffles her mother, Judy Kish. “I truly did not use Hamburger Helper very often,” she said during a recent family interview on Zoom. “I really don’t understand why it’s so vivid in her memory, to tell you the truth.”The elder Ms. Kish was a high school teacher, and her husband, Michael, was an engineer at a company that made corrugated cardboard boxes. In 1984, the couple adopted the four-month-old Kristen, who had been abandoned shortly after birth at a clinic outside Seoul.They strove to keep her connected to her birth country, making sure she tasted kimchi, introducing her to a Korean exchange student and reading her “The Korean Cinderella” by Shirley Climo. (Ms. Kish had the story spray-painted on the restroom walls of her restaurant. Speakers softly play a recording of a woman reading it in Korean.)A young Ms. Kish giving her mother, Judy, a ride on a tractor. Courtesy of Clarkson PotterFor a long time, Ms. Kish tried not to think about her Korean roots. “I put it aside because I was scared that I was going to find out something that I didn’t want to find out about where I actually came from,” she said.Still, in her 20s, she had her Korean name and adoption case number inked on her wrist — the first of many tattoos marking important moments in her life.After she won “Top Chef,” she vowed to use some of the $125,000 prize money to visit South Korea, but couldn’t go through with it. Nine years later, Netflix sent her to Seoul on a five-day promotional trip tied to her work as a host on “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend.” She didn’t search out orphanages, as some adoptees do. Instead, she focused on learning about the food.Can someone who didn’t grow up in a Korean family legitimately cook the cuisine? It’s a question she grapples with.“I’m trying to own that side of me so it doesn’t feel like I’m appropriating a culture that doesn’t belong to me,” she said. “I clearly can have a point of view about Korean American food. There is a connection. I’m allowed to explore it. But for a long time I felt guilty about it.”An Education in FameDespite her shyness as a child, she had a lot of friends. By high school she was firmly ensconced with the preps.“We had Abercrombie clothes, and I had purple contacts,” she said. “I was trying to be everything except me. I wanted to hide.”Especially, she said, her budding attraction to women.Her grades weren’t good enough to get into Michigan State University, where her brother and both her parents graduated. She spent a year at Grand Valley State University, but didn’t go back. Her parents, who said she always had a creative streak with food, sent her to Chicago to attend Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. She loved it and graduated, but also discovered cocaine and the bars.“A lot of it was trying to mask and self-medicate my social anxiety and my sexuality,” she said. Ms. Kish convinced herself that being successful couldn’t include being gay.Ms. Kish brings her longtime hairstylist to the set, and likes to have a candle and candy in her dressing room. Lyndon French for The New York TimesShe kept partying, turning down jobs she thought were beneath her. Finally, her parents stopped paying for her nice apartment. She moved back home, depressed and defeated.They gave her one more chance. They knew of a room for rent in Boston, and offered to help pay for it if she found a job within three weeks.She did, cooking in a series of kitchens that led to a job at Stir, a cookbook store and demonstration kitchen owned by the chef and restaurateur Barbara Lynch. Ms. Lynch became a mentor, passing her name to producers who had called looking for new “Top Chef” contestants.Ms. Lynch wrote a letter that Ms. Kish had in her back pocket when she won. “So very proud of you,” it read. “Breathe and most of all enjoy the experience!!”Ms. Kish doesn’t have much to say about recent reports that Ms. Lynch verbally and physically harassed workers at her restaurants.“I had been removed from her company for 10 years, so I don’t know,” Ms. Kish said. “What I do know is that if she never said, ‘Kristen, you can win Top Chef,’ none of this would be happening. And that’s a fact.”Over a cheeseburger at Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan last month, Ms. Kish pondered how to navigate her fast-rising fame. She guards the name of the town where she lives, and is careful what she says when she’s out somewhere, because people eavesdrop. She is trying to get better at responding to the strangers who approach her in places like the supermarket.Bianca Dusic, Ms. Kish’s wife, often travels with her to jobs, and is close with Ms. Kish’s family.Lyndon French for The New York Times“When I get insecure and uncomfortable and socially anxious, I kind of become, for lack of a better term, a bitch,” Ms. Kish said. Ms. Dusic prompts her to snap out of it with a code phrase: “Nasty Nancy’s here.”The two met when Ms. Dusic was the corporate executive assigned to help Ms. Kish open her Austin restaurant in the LINE Hotel in 2018. After six months of intense work side by side, they shared a high-five that lasted a little longer than they expected.They were married in their backyard in April 2021. As with their engagement, Ms. Kish announced it on Instagram.Ms. Dusic, 44, left the restaurant industry when the stress of working during the Covid shutdowns and grief over her father’s death from cancer made her sick. Now she is a “mind-set and transformation coach” who offers breath work and other therapies, which she uses to help Ms. Kish. She also has persuaded Ms. Kish to stop ordering so much takeout.Ms. Dusic frequently accompanies Ms. Kish when she works. At home, they putter in the garden, drink tea and are in bed by 10 p.m. It’s all about managing a life that just keeps getting bigger.“This was never the plan,” Ms. Kish said. “The plan would have been for me to just work in a little restaurant, making ends meet, doing my life and just keep trucking along.”Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Kristen Kish Chosen as Next ‘Top Chef’ Host

      by

      Kish, who will bring considerable TV experience to the role, succeeds Padma Lakshmi, who hosted the show for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kristen Kish, an acclaimed chef who won the 10th season of “Top Chef” more than a decade ago, will return as the next host of the long-running culinary competition, Bravo announced on Tuesday. She will succeed Padma Lakshmi, who said last month she would be departing the show, which she had hosted for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kish, who has hosted several other food-related series, will take the reins for Season 21, which the network has said will take place in Wisconsin. She will join the food writer Gail Simmons and the chef Tom Colicchio at the judges table.“‘Top Chef’ is where I started my journey — first as a competing chef, then a guest judge and now as host, I have the honor of helping to continue to build this brand,” Kish said in a statement. “It feels like coming home.”Kish, who was adopted from South Korea and grew up in Kentwood, Mich., attended Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. She then spent a decade working at restaurants in Boston, rising through the ranks to become the chef de cuisine at Barbara Lynch’s crown jewel restaurant, Menton.As The New York Times reported in 2014, Lynch had encouraged Kish and another young chef from her restaurant group to compete on “Top Chef.”Kish won Season 10, and has become a familiar face on the show in recent years as a guest judge. She has also opened her first restaurant, released a cookbook and has hosted or starred in several shows including “36 Hours,” a Travel Channel show that is a collaboration with The Times; “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend,” and “Restaurants at the End of the World.”Ryan Flynn, an NBCUniversal senior vice president, said in a statement that Kish was “the perfect host for the next chapter of ‘Top Chef’ as we take on a new region of the country we haven’t explored.”Both Colicchio and Simmons published posts on Instagram Tuesday afternoon applauding the choice of Kish.“She is an excellent chef, brings a world class perspective and most importantly, having been a past contestant and judge, she knows what it takes to win @bravotopchef,” Colicchio wrote.“Psyched beyond words to have her pull up that seat at Judges’ Table,” Simmons said.In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Kish added that she was already “overwhelmed by the amazing outpouring of support by the fans of ‘Top Chef’ embracing this new chapter.”“I am eager to get started!” she said.Maya Salam contributed reporting. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      On ‘The Bear,’ Staging at a Fine-Dining Restaurant Is Rosier Than Reality

      by

      Real-life chefs said the portrayal of haute cuisine work was a bit soft-focus.In its second season, the hit FX show “The Bear” ventures into the world of fine dining. As the scrappy Chicago restaurant crashes toward a reopening, two of the employees leave to apprentice at top restaurants in Chicago and Copenhagen.They wake up early and stay late. One polishes forks for hours, the other practices the same pastry techniques over and over and over. They see excellence, and they learn. In fine dining, this sort of apprenticeship is called a “stage,” which rhymes with “mirage.”But for a show often praised for its realistic portrayal of restaurant life, “The Bear” depicts haute cuisine staging as much more personal and touchy-feely than some chefs remembered.After a yearslong industrywide upheaval over work culture and questions about the long-term sustainability of the fine-dining model, some chefs said the show could give diners a frustratingly sunny impression of the realities of working in fine-dining restaurants.“It’s kind of a soap opera,” said Kwang Uh, the chef of Baroo, which is preparing to reopen in Los Angeles. “It’s not a documentary.”Mr. Uh, who runs Baroo with his wife, Mina Park, staged for three months at Noma, in Copenhagen, which recently said it would close its doors to diners.In “The Bear,” Marcus, the pastry chef played by Lionel Boyce, also travels to Copenhagen to stage at a restaurant that closely resembles Noma, though it’s never named in the show.In his very first task, Marcus positions ingredients with long tweezers, focusing in the quiet kitchen on preparing a full dish.Mr. Uh said that rarely happens, even with seasoned chefs. When he arrived at Noma, he had eight years of experience and had even managed restaurants, including Nobu Bahamas. But in the beginning, he picked herbs at Noma and sawed bones for marrow by hand.“Maybe he’s more of a V.I.P.?” Mr. Uh said of Marcus.Eric Rivera, a chef based in Raleigh, N.C., who also staged at Noma said: “Ninety-five percent of your day is cleaning stuff, picking stuff. You’re not plating dishes.”Two of the chefs on “The Bear” also go to culinary school, where they learn knife skills.HuluRichie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, stages at a top restaurant in Chicago. (It is also not named, but the scenes were filmed at Ever, which has two Michelin stars.)In one scene, he peels mushrooms with the executive chef, Chef Terry, played by Olivia Colman. As they work side by side, she quickly reveals an extraordinarily personal detail: memories from her dead father’s notebooks.“That would probably never, ever happen,” said Stephen Chavez, who teaches at the Institute of Culinary Education’s Los Angeles campus.Mr. Rivera also found such a scenario far-fetched. “It’s obscenely rare that stages will even be able to meet the chef,” he said.He also doubted that an employee at a scrappy restaurant in Chicago could afford to go live in Copenhagen and work at the restaurant, which did not pay its interns until recently.“That’s what that show does — they paint this rosy picture of even how it is,” Mr. Rivera said. He added, “This is like, puppies and rainbows.”And “The Bear” addresses the changing culture of kitchens, though neither portrayal is necessarily accurate.In Copenhagen, the chef training Marcus, played by Will Poulter, does not raise his voice as he corrects Marcus’s technique. “No, again, Chef,” he says. “No, worse. Again, Chef.” Firm, but even.Marcus has a wonderful time, but unpaid restaurant interns at some of Copenhagen’s top restaurants reportedly faced abuse and dangerous working conditions for years.Still, many chefs said, the show gets a lot right.Both chefs start early — Marcus arrives at 4:50 a.m. — and both head home after dark.At Noma, stages often work 15 hours, said David Zilber, who is the former director of the Fermentation Lab. Mr. Rivera said he regularly started at 8:30 a.m. and left at 2 a.m.Richie, right, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, gets into the excellence of Ever.Chuck Hoades/FXAnd at both stages, they see the cultish commitment to excellence at top restaurants.In Chicago, for instance, Richie shines forks for a full shift. He’s furious, swearing and throwing the cutlery until his mentor sets him straight.“Do you think this is below you, or something?” he asks Richie, before launching into a monologue. Shining forks is about respect, about standards. “Every day here is the freaking Super Bowl.”That part is accurate, too, said Amy Cordell, the director of hospitality for the Ever Restaurant Group. Cleaning silverware is not grunt work, she said. It’s an important detail, just like all the other important details.“There’s no one job that is more or less important than another,” she said. “Finding the perfect cook doesn’t come from them showcasing their knife skills. It comes from how they sweep the floor.”Even with the long hours, the precarity and the low pay, many cooks still agree that stages are essential learning experiences.Hannah Barton, a manager at Herons in North Carolina, staged at Ever for just two days.It has changed the way she does seating, and even the way she hires new staff members, she said.“It seemed like everyone in that building had also drunk the Kool-Aid,” she said. “I wish that all of my servers could have that exact same mentality.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Bear’ Season 2 Puts a Little Optimism on the Menu

      by

      With a gentler tone and reverence for hospitality, the Hulu show reaches beyond the chef to give other workers the spotlight.This article contains spoilers for the Hulu series “The Bear.”Even before the bump in Italian beef sandwich sales last year, you could sense an immediate, almost feverish enthusiasm for “The Bear.” You could measure it, not in actual views (Hulu doesn’t release streaming data), but in thirsty memes of Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto, the broken chef with a wavy jumble of unwashed hair and a startled, pink face that always seemed recently slapped.Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, is the tortured chef at the center of “The Bear,” determined to, though not always capable of, doing things differently.Chuck Hodes/FXCarmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, became the patron saint of obsessive chefs, their personal lives obliterated by a dedication to restaurant work. After his brother’s death, Carmy was determined to get his family’s ancient, grimy, lawless sandwich shop into shape while also, somehow, being a good guy — a dilemma he tackled between exploding toilets, fights, Al-Anon meetings and panic attacks.“I’m fine, really,” Carmy told his sister over the phone, “I just have trouble breathing sometimes and wake up screaming.”The breakout show’s portrayal of the anxiety and tension that rule restaurant kitchens was darkly realistic. And while the second season, which premiered Thursday on Hulu, doesn’t completely leave those pressures behind, it conveys an unexpected optimism about the restaurant industry and the people who make it run.The new season of “The Bear” follows its workers on their various adventures as the restaurant closes for renovations.Chuck Hodes/FXSeason 2 of “The Bear” swivels attention away from the chef and his trauma to spend time with other characters and, in the process, does something that TV and movies about restaurants hardly ever do: It subverts the power structure of the brigade system and invites more workers into the center of the story, where they belong.Though it never feels instructive or moralizing, there’s a sense of hopefulness as “The Bear” wrestles with larger themes of hospitality. Each member of the kitchen crew finds moments of joy and deep meaning in their work, whether they’re drawn to it by devotion or dysfunction (or a broken emulsion of both).In its second season, “The Bear” sends two of its characters on transformational internships, or stages, at other restaurants. Lionel Boyce, left, is Marcus, a pastry chef who finds inspiration on a gentle internship in Copenhagen.Chuck Hodes/FXOne episode focuses on Marcus, the young pastry cook who’s a sponge for new techniques and ingredients, played by Lionel Boyce. In Copenhagen, he interns with a brilliant pastry chef played by Will Poulter.It doesn’t matter that recent reporting on the stage economy of Copenhagen, one of the world’s fine-dining capitals, has revealed a pattern of abuse and dangerous working conditions for unpaid interns. In “The Bear,” the stage is a dream: Marcus’s tasks are simply to learn from a skilled but kind and patient mentor, to get out and about and feel inspired, and to come up with some new dishes of his own.A stage at a fine-dining restaurant transforms Richie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach.Chuck Hodes/FXNo one was more suspicious of the fussy quirks of fine-dining kitchens than Richie, the fragile chaos machine played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. But after a stage of his own in a Chicago fine-dining restaurant, Richie is completely transformed. He cares about organizing pens and polishing silverware. He wears suits now.In an arc that made me weep, Richie learns that he has the aptitude and composure for expediting, for being in the eye of the storm, for channeling all of his pettiness and intensity into fixing problems and making diners happy.There were flashbacks, in the first season of “The Bear,” of a toxic chef who trashed cooks on the line, telling them they’d be better off dead. But here the show seems keen to remind us that fine dining can work differently, and that wonderful people are still scattered throughout it.“The Bear” always blurred the lines between family and workplace in ways that felt both tender and menacing, and the most nightmarish kitchen scene takes place not in a professional kitchen, but at a Berzatto family Christmas at home a few years back, when Carmy’s brother Michael was still alive.Jamie Lee Curtis is devastating as their alcoholic mother who can’t get through cooking and serving a beautiful holiday dinner — an elaborate Feast of the Seven Fishes — without wringing guilt and shame from her children. Her inability to host offers a glimpse at what shaped the siblings and warped their relationships to cooking, but it’s also a razor-edged contrast to the cooks’ growing sense of hospitality as instinctual and deeply fulfilling.Sydney, played by Ayo Edebiri, is the enterprising stagiaire who quickly turned her internship into a serious job.Chuck Hodes/FXSydney (Ayo Edebiri) is crushed by her anxiety about the restaurant opening and herself as a leader. She worries about failure, but also about not having a financial stake in the business.Despite all of that, she’s delighted and re-energized after making a simple omelet for Carmy’s woozy, hungry sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott). She tops it with chives and crushed potato chips, plating it beautifully on a tray, as if she were carrying it to her own mother on a holiday morning. As she stands behind Natalie, watching her eat, Sydney looks happier than she’s been in ages.It’s a beautiful and agonizing scene that compounds the hospitality industry’s complications, and the ways a calling to it can both hurt and heal. Sure, Sydney deserves more than the pleasure of watching someone fill with happiness when they eat her food. But also, that pleasure is real and, sometimes, there isn’t anything else.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More