When, after three years, DiSpirito left the New Hyde Park Inn to go to The Culinary Institute of America, he did so with basic skills and knowledge and the understanding that this was a profession that could be taken seriously. Upon his return from Paris in the fall of l987, DiSpirito began the next phase of his education—finding his kitchen.
Professional kitchens are like clothing—sometimes they fit, sometimes they don’t. Some are too flashy, some too conservative, some too sloppy, some too severe. That December, DiSpirito started work under the French chefs Jacques Chibois and Jean-Michel Diot at Adrienne. After a year, he enrolled at Boston University for a degree in business at the School of Hospitality Administration (becoming a teaching assistant before graduating cum laude in 1990). He paid his tuition by taking part-time jobs as personal cook to New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis and chef de partie at Aujourd’hui at the Four Seasons Hotel. The day he left Adrienne, a new chef was being brought in—a man shrouded in rumor. “This crazy Swiss man from Plume in Hong Kong,” DiSpirito remembers people saying. When he returned home to New York, he staged at various restaurants for several months before landing a job at Lespinasse, one of the best restaurants in the city. But there was a new chef here, too—that same “crazy man” from Bern, Switzerland: Gray Kunz.
“Everything just clicked,” DiSpirito says. “There was a phenomenal sense of structure. I fit right into that. I thrived. I knew that here was someone with a master plan.” Of Kunz’s style, DiSpirito says: “He’s extremely tough.” He imitates Kunz screaming, then says, “Once he yelled at a cook so loud, the guy’s hat fell off!”
But his predominant memories of Lespinasse are of extraordinary products and extraordinary cooks. “I don’t think there will be an ensemble cast in a kitchen like that again. It was unreal.” And the food? “Ingenious in conception and flawless in execution”—black bass with water spinach and a red-pepper and kaffir-lime reduction; white truffle risotto (“Exactly the way I make it today but with a different garnish: He used mushrooms; I use shrimp”); a quick sauté of Belgian endive served with walleyed pike and a little sabayon that Kunz would brûlée or glaze.
And then there were the amazing short ribs. “It wasn’t till I saw Kunz use all these same individual elements that I had been learning and put them together in such an interesting, seamless way that I realized what levels could be achieved,” says DiSpirito. “We used to make braised short ribs at the New Hyde Park Inn. They were delicious. When I was at Lespinasse we did braised short ribs with a papaya compote, a fascinating dish. Same cooking technique; the exact same process.”
So here it is. This is what is at the core of the hot, young, cutting-edge, American, Generation-X, rising-star chef: a classical, old-world European apprenticeship. “Gray and Bernhard,” DiSpirito says. “They are the ones who helped me put it all together.”
If American restaurants had been only about cooking, DiSpirito would have been fine when he set out on his own. His food has almost invariably received rave reviews. But he didn’t know how to run a restaurant. This became clear when the first two restaurants to hire him as executive chef—Annabelle and Dava—both failed within a year. He twists uneasily in his seat at the memory. “I never thought I’d be part of a failing restaurant,” he says. “I always worked with great people in successful places and ...” He trails off as if in disbelief, even now, five years after storming out of the Dava kitchen.
A little over a year later, he met with two restaurant operators who had a concept—“Asian-fusion cuisine”—but hadn’t quite made a final decision about the chef. Steve Scher, one of the partners, said that after DiSpirito cooked for them, “We made him an offer the next day.” It’s an indication of DiSpirito’s intelligence and talent that Union Pacific does not serve Asian-fusion cuisine: It serves Rocco DiSpirito cuisine.
In person DiSpirito is decorous and gentlemanly in his immaculate jacket and neckerchief. You are not likely to see him posing nude with an appliance or trying to beat the clock on a goofy TV show. Says Mark Dissin, a producer at the Food Network, “He doesn’t really go after publicity like that. And yet, he manages his persona very carefully.”
There is indeed something of the Eagle Scout about DiSpirito, something a little too clean in his complexion and his brilliant, straight teeth, in his graceful posture, in his easy laughter. Something perhaps calculating. Serious, driven, and intense, he knows that being a chef today requires an image as managed as any major politician’s, and he aims to manipulate that perception as efficiently as he brings a risotto to silky perfection.
But while a chef’s media persona can be deceptive, his or her identity in purely professional terms is completely unobscured in the kitchen, where motives and character cannot be hidden. DiSpirito’s kitchen at Union Pacific is very clean. Lingering diners will see the walls, counters, coolers, stovetops, and floors being hosed down after each service. A knife set out for slicing the poached capon is honed to a skinny swordlike shape, and it’s as sharp as a straight razor.
Gray Kunz says of DiSpirito: “Good butcher. Very quick on the line, very concentrated, extremely focused, very quiet.” (Quiet as a cook, perhaps, but, not unlike Kunz, a screamer at the pass if the meat station is slow with a rack of lamb.) The cutting board is in continual use and stays immaculate even as the kitchen gets slammed. The cooks, all of whom must wear hats and, during service, neckerchiefs (an anachronism in a kitchen run by so young a chef), are courteous with one another: This is not a cutthroat kitchen, nor is it heavy with stifled anxiety.
Pinterest
