In the fall of 1986, Rocco DiSpirito arrived in the lobby of Paris’s intimidating Prince de Galles hotel with several suitcases of clothes, some 30 cookbooks, and his knives. He was 19 years old and on the brink of realizing a dream: a year as an apprentice in a classical French kitchen. He expected to go straight to work. Instead, he was told to wait.
Exhausted after the all-night flight, DiSpirito sat in the lobby for four hours before the hotel’s chef, Dominique Cecillon, appeared. Cecillon asked to see his work visa; DiSpirito could produce only his passport. The chef shook his head. He couldn’t hire an American without a visa. DiSpirito, who spoke no French, tried to convey that the chef at the New York Marriott Marquis had arranged for him to do a year’s stage at the Prince de Galles and to stay there until he could find accommodation elsewhere. Everything had been confirmed months ago! He’d given up a culinary fellowship and an opportunity to help open a new restaurant, Lafayette, under Jean-Georges Vongerichten to be here. Again Cecillon shook his head. Also, there were no rooms at the hotel ... sorry.
Then Cecillon looked at the youth from Jamaica, Queens, and softened a bit (“I think he saw tears,” DiSpirito says). The American could stay with the chef’s family that night—but could take with him only what he could carry on a motorbike. He soon found himself on a tour of what he recalls as the most beautiful city on earth.
“That was the moment I realized this was going to be an unbelievable year,” he says. And it was. He finagled a temporary student visa and found a job as a cook at a restaurant called Marshall’s, working seven days and about 120 hours a week. He slept in the locker area in Marshall’s basement. He slept in the métro. He slept in an artist squat so cold that he had to take a bucket of hot water to the outdoor toilet to prevent it from freezing. In his spare time, he worked (without pay) for Cecillon, who had begun to treat him like an adopted son.
Fourteen years later, DiSpirito is the chef at Union Pacific in Manhattan and widely considered one of the country’s most exciting chefs. This doesn’t happen by accident: The work is too hard and for most cooks—those legions who barely see the light of day, let alone the lights of a Food Network studio—vastly unrewarding, except for a sense of personal satisfaction. To be ranked, then, as he has been, with the likes of Boulud, Vongerichten, Ripert, and Müller, as well as higher than the great American-born chefs like Bouley, Palmer, and the others—all of them a decade or more his senior—is, at the very least, peculiar enough to make anyone ask: How did this happen?
The raves began when DiSpirito was still in his twenties and working in the toughest, most competitive restaurant city in the world. This early acclaim turned out to be something of a mixed blessing: His ambition and the intensity of his demand for perfection sometimes exceed his experience. The waiting time between courses at Union Pacific can exceed 40 minutes. Untested dishes intended to wow a VIP diner can sometimes land with a thud on the palate. His extraordinary attempt to serve a degustation menu of 21 little dishes proved too difficult for the restaurant to accomplish and had to be taken off the menu (it is now served only on request).
But when he is good, DiSpirito rates at the top of his profession. His plates arrive at the table with a simplicity of presentation and a complexity of flavors and ingredients that belie his age. He offsets classical European techniques and preparations with unconventional, vivid flavors: scallops with mustard oil, veal chop with green paprika, lobster with coriander, skate with lime-pickled chard. And he does so with finesse: These combinations seem refreshing and exciting rather than strange. DiSpirito has embraced slow-cooking with a vengeance—poaching fish and meats in goose fat at very low temperatures, baking salmon in a salt crust at 275 degrees for 20 minutes, and cooking sous-vide (vacuum-sealed) halibut and chicken in the 160-degree water from the kitchen tap to ensure uniform doneness and no loss of natural juices. It’s the kind of cooking that has lured Manhattan’s most respected chefs.
The way a chef runs his kitchen—his level of discipline, cleanliness, technique, and intensity—is a projection of early lessons. At the age of 15, DiSpirito went to work for Bernhard Breiter, chef at the New Hyde Park Inn on Long Island. Breiter had served a classical European apprenticeship, and he passed on the value of this training to the young DiSpirito.
“Old European standards. Everything from scratch,” DiSpirito remembers. “You did prime rib, you got the whole rib in. Whole rib of beef. You cut your short ribs off, and we did short ribs. We got whole venison there. We skinned ’em and broke ’em down into primal cuts. Now no one sees that stuff. Now I get my short ribs to my spec, cut four inches tall.” Along with basic techniques, he learned from Breiter the underlying ethos of a classically run kitchen. He saw the importance of high values and of passing on those values to others. “He made me understand that nothing should be taken for granted. That you have to earn every step. Kitchen etiquette and efficiency. I resented it. I hated it.”
Recalling the days when he would be smacked in the face with a bunch of celery for mouthing off, or threatened with a knife, he continues, “They were yelling at me all the time. There were times when I wanted to kill Bernhard.” And yet DiSpirito stayed. He stayed because he sensed an ultimate benevolence both in Breiter and in the work of cooking and serving food. “They were investing in me. Today you don’t find a lot of people willing to really pummel cooks until they learn. And you don’t find a lot of cooks who will tolerate that either.”
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.
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.