Celebrity chefs were the star attraction at the Gourmet Institute weekend in New York, but the food - and food talk - was the main course.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published October 27, 2004
[AP photos]
The much-honored chef of Aquavit, Marcus Samuelsson, prepares his new Scandinavian cuisine at a seminar Saturday during the Gourmet Institute.
Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl, whose magazine staged the weekend of seminars and culinary activities, greets participants at a welcome gala Friday in New York’s Rainbow Room.
NEW YORK - Forget actors and athletes. Never mind rockers and supermodels.
The biggest rising stars on the planet these days are people who can cook. Especially if they prepare food on TV or in big-city restaurants that may or may not bear their names.
And when you are in a room with a glittering gaggle of celebrity chefs, the first thing you do, after you size them up and decide whether the television camera does them justice, is get their autographs.
For many people at the second Gourmet Institute here last weekend, getting an apron or cookbook signed was one of the highlights. The other was a chance to take seminars on topics as varied as sustainable farming, wine pairing and rediscovering the mortar and pestle from well-regarded chefs, noteworthy food authorities and the staff of Gourmet magazine.
Not everyone, though, was a wide-eyed fan of the food giants. "What am I going to do with an apron signed by all these chefs?" asked one man waiting for a seminar by authors Jane and Michael Stern.
"EBay, baby," someone offered.
Some 330 people from as faraway as Hawaii and England, and as close as Greenwich Village, plunked down $1,290 for a weekend of culinary enlightenment led by food gurus such as Sara Moulton, Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Alain Ducasse, Marcus Samuelsson and Lidia Bastianich.
And poor Rocco DiSpirito.
Someone should have warned the embattled chef that Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and executive chef at Les Halles, and Batali, of Food Network and multiple restaurant fame, were going to trash him during their aptly named talk, "Bad Boys in the Kitchen."
Bad boys, indeed. Word spread quickly that Bourdain and Batali didn't have kind words for DiSpirito, who is now without a restaurant since Rocco's 22nd Street, the infamous setting of his failed reality TV show, was shuttered and he was tossed earlier this month as executive chef at Union Pacific. The kid's made a lot of bad decisions, they said. But they didn't say it that nicely.
Even Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, didn't escape criticism at her own party, though not from the chefs she'd invited to take part. Several longtime Gourmet subscribers grumbled at the opening cocktail party at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center that the magazine was better before Reichl, the former restaurant critic of the New York Times , took over in 1999. Too cutesy now, they said. They also didn't much care for singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb, whose performance did seem out of place unless you remembered she had a short-lived show on the Food Network with Dweezil Zappa.
Nevertheless, Reichl held her audience rapt two days later when she read excerpts from her book Garlic and Sapphires , to be published in the spring. Dressed in black shirt, skirt, stockings and shoes, and with her long, jet-black hair framing her face and cascading down her back, Reichl looked more like a college drama teacher than the editorial leader of a magazine with nearly 1-million subscribers.
Each chapter of the book tells the story of a different persona and disguise that Reichl adopted to protect her anonymity as a critic. There was Molly who got treated lousy at Le Cirque, and Chloe, the blond, who outsmarted a date and the chef at Lespinasse.
The Conde Nast building on Times Square, which houses the Gourmet offices and other magazines including the New Yorker , Vanity Fair and Glamour, was the location of the food fest. Attendees got a chance to see the studio with the floor-to-ceiling windows where many of the delicious food photos are shot and everyone who walked through the well-appointed test kitchens got misty. More than one person wondered if Gourmet was hiring.
People who attended Ihsan Gurdal's farmhouse cheese seminar were treated to a tasting of eight cheeses, including Comte's Le Fort, a cow's milk cheese from Jura, France. Gurdal's Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, Mass., is the only U.S. purveyor of the cheese the former Turkish Olympic volleyball player calls the "grand fromage of the world."
At Ducasse's seminar on the mortar and pestle, the formidable French chef made pesto and baba ghanouj, then offered another plate of condiments to sample, including a Provencal tomato melange and a curious mango sauce that lacked the typical tropical taste.
Vongerichten topped a duck breast with cracked Jordan Almonds before sliding the bird under the broiler. Yes, those candied almonds you get as favors at weddings. And the quirky Gabrielle Hamilton, of Prune in the East Village, made four dishes from three ingredients: hearty brown bread, watermelon radishes and Yarra Valley salmon roe from Australia.
"I think this will taste good to you if you are pregnant," she said. She was pregnant several months ago when she suggested the topic.
For many people, the event was about more than learning to make elegant hors d'oeuvres from Moulton or about the principles of new Scandinavian cuisine from Samuelsson, the much-honored chef of Aquavit and one of the world's most beautiful people, according to People magazine.
(Aquavit was one of five restaurants at which attendees dined Saturday night. The others were Beppe, 'Cesca, Sumile and Union Pacific, where DiSpirito and his mother, the primary meatball maker on the reality show, charmed each table.)
It was really about sharing a passion for food with kindred spirits. Where else could you overhear someone talking about her favorite sweetbread recipe or a discussion about the flavor a vertical half of an English cucumber added to a pitcher of ice water?
Rhonda from Los Altos, Calif., suggested it made the water taste wetter. Emily from Long Island concurred. Yes, fresher. Carol, from Loveland, Colo., was more concerned that the menacing length of cucumber might tumble into her glass.
These are people who love their food. And unlike sports fanatics or pop music lovers, they have few people in their everyday lives who want to talk (or even know) about California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's threat to ban imported foie gras from his state or why America's artisanal cheese industry is exploding.
No such hardship at the Gourmet Institute, where at least three chefs featured foie gras in their demonstrations and it seemed everyone had heard of the fabulous cheeses being made in Vermont.
"I don't know what Schwarzenegger is talking about," said Vongerichten, chef/owner of numerous Manhattan restaurants including Jean-Georges and Vong and a favorite of New York food critics. "He is from Austria. He grew up on foie gras, that's where the muscles came from."
The Gourmet Institute, which Reichl says she expects to continue next year, is a pricy weekend. The seminar fee does not include hotel and transportation to the city, which can add another $1,000 depending on how far an attendee is coming from.
Many people attended on business such as Stephanie Martin, a personal chef from Valrico. She was looking for menu ideas and trends, but having a good time mostly. For many of the women, who outnumbered the men, the weekend was a birthday or anniversary treat, a mother-and-daughter retreat, or a way to spend time with friends who live far away.
