DiSpirito himself expedites almost every meal throughout the year: He’ll miss maybe 20 of the restaurant’s 550 services. His favorite things to eat are sushi and his raw-fish preparations, but his favorite things to cook, revealingly, are common to any home kitchen—eggs and soup. “I am a really good breakfast cook, by the way,” DiSpirito offers. “I can handle, like, nine pans of over-easy eggs, no problem.” An omelet prepared by a prospective cook is, he says, more revealing than any résumé.
It could be said that the true Rocco DiSpirito is revealed at 5 P.M. on any given Saturday night as he and his brigade sprint toward service. DiSpirito runs one of the most popular restaurants in New York City. He is pushed and pulled from every direction for special appearances, charity events, and newspaper, magazine, and television interviews. On cooking shows, he has the grace and styled ease of a network news anchor—but it is a grace and ease that was developed while being beaten, physically and mentally, as a young cook. He could be anywhere in the kitchen, doing anything, but invariably you will find him over a wooden board ... cutting chives. This is among the most menial of last-minute kitchen labors, exactly one step above scrubbing pots or mopping the floor. But DiSpirito says he has yet to find a cook who can cut chives properly, and so, for 20 minutes, he does them himself.
Perhaps this is the secret of DiSpirito’s success. From the beginning, he’s had the ability not merely to accept the brutality of the work as something a cook must endure but rather to luxuriate in it—to actually thrive on its rigors. Of course, he might have become nothing more than just another tough cook if he hadn’t learned something else: the importance of the simple act of cutting chives.
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