Foodies Clan

Look at his lil face!!

If you are not already following Mondo Mascots, you should be. The site, run by Chris Carlier, looks into the deep world of Japanese mascots, of which there appear to be nearly infinite options. As Eater has pointed out before, there’s Peanuts-kun, the YouTuber with a peanut for a head. There’s Shugar, the polar bear sugar cube, who represents the website Shuf-Chef. But please, take a moment out of your day to consider Inuman, the half pork bun half dog.

Inuman is... so cute. It is unbearable. He comes in a little paper sack! He is full of pork! He is also full of mystery, as any search for “Inuman pork dog mascot” or “give me the pork bun dog japan” brings up nothing about who he is or why he was created. Mondo Mascots tweeted that it found him in a Tokyo toy store, but do not specify if he is an actual mascot or if he is simply a beautiful creature for whom we must at once develop an institution worthy of his mascotitude. A pork bun dog cafe? The paper sleeve manufacturer? The ASPCA? Someone just tell me where to send my money, I’ll take two.

Plus, there’s a massive salmonella outbreak in ground beef, and more news to start your day

The fast-food chain is hoping nostalgia can drive some sales

With all the changes made to the Happy Meal in recent years, the childhood treat is nearly unrecognizable to Gen Xers and Millennials. Where is the mandatory soda? Where is the toy that is surely a choking hazard? So now, in an attempt to lure back the kind of grown person who casually uses the phrase “adulting” — and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Happy Meal — McDonald’s is reintroducing 15 popular toys from the Happy Meal’s past, including the Hamburglar and Grimace, one of the Teenie Beanie Babies, a Furby, and Hello Kitty.

Speeeaking of McDonald’s, the company is likely hoping the Happy Meal fervor overshadows the fact that its CEO, Steve Easterbrook, was just ousted for having a consensual relationship with a subordinate. The company’s board determined Eastbrook “violated company policy and demonstrated poor judgment involving a recent consensual relationship with an employee,” and Eastbrook admitted the relationship was “a mistake.” Market Insider says that, because of the upheaval, the company is set to lose $3.4 billion in value.

Surely plastic models of the Fry Guys will even that out.

And in other news...

• For some reason, when reporting on the Steve Eastbrook news, The Daily Mail used a photo of Chrissy Teigen. She is not into it. [Twitter]
• One person has died and eight have been hospitalized due to an outbreak of salmonella in ground beef. So far it’s been found in six states, but officials haven’t found a common source. [Time]
• Apparently eating alone is bad for both our mental health and for the planet. Bad news to anyone who wants a moment of peace over a dinner and glass of wine. [Quartz]
• Last year, two Black men were arrested in a Starbucks in Philadelphia under “suspicion of trespassing,” launching a wave of outrage and boycotts against the company. Now, the woman who was regional manager at that location at the time of the arrests is claiming she was fired because she is white. [NBC News]
• Culinary scholars are cooking food from the oldest recipes known to humanity, as early as 1730 BC. They include lamb stew, broth with leek and coriander, and something close to a chicken pot pie. [BBC]
• A Minnesota student has been asked by Krispy Kreme to stop driving into Iowa, buying dozens of donuts, and selling them on campus. Minnesota doesn’t have a Krispy Kreme, so what else was he supposed to do? [The Detroit News]
• Kanye West’s Louisiana Sunday Service’s food options are being compared to Fyre Festival. What was supposed to be a $55 “Brunchella” was really soggy bacon and cold pancakes. [Insider]
• Papa John’s is adding a new kind of crust. Good for Papa. [CNN]
• Also, muscle memory is real.

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

How David Zilber found his niche in the culinary world

In How I Got My Job, folks from across the food and restaurant industry answer Eater’s questions about, well, how they got their job. Today’s installment: David Zilber.

Young cooks — or, really, young people in any field — have much to learn from David Zilber’s career. As head of the Fermentation Lab at Noma, Zilber is in charge of experimenting with and creating the unique ingredients like pea miso or rose kombucha that have come to define Renė Redzepi’s world-renowned restaurant. Zilber regularly shares his discoveries on the Fermentation Lab’s Instagram account and, last year, he and Redzepi co-wrote a book about their work, The Noma Field Guide to Fermentation.

It’s one of the most interesting (and prestigious) jobs in the culinary world — and one that Zilber earned not just through the classic combination of hard work, experience, and talent, but by constantly teaching himself new things, taking risks, and embracing the sciences. “It can sometimes feel like all there is is gastronomy,” he says. “But the world is so much bigger than that. So much of gastronomy is informed by mechanisms, sciences, and natural laws that sit just beyond the horizon of recipes and cultures that make up the world of food. Some of the biggest insights into my job have come from the fields of economics or cognitive science.”

In the following Q&A, Zilber traces the arc of his career path from a cooking apprenticeship he took on as a high schooler in Toronto to his decision to leave Canada to see if he could make it in Copenhagen. He also shares the wisdom he’s gleaned through experiences like dropping out of culinary school, dealing with the criminally low pay of restaurant jobs, and becoming an omnivorous reader.

Eater: What does your job involve?

David Zilber: My job involves a lot, I guess. Technically my title is Director of Fermentation, and that means I’m in charge of Noma’s scientifically oriented research and development kitchen.

Noma has two R&D kitchens: the Test Kitchen, which invents the actual dishes our guests eat, and the Fermentation Lab, which supplies the Test Kitchen with novel ingredients to make those dishes with. Within that scope, my team and I look to all areas of food science to find new and interesting things for the chefs in the Test Kitchen to work with. That could be a new vinegar or kombucha using a microbe we’ve never encountered before, or a new way of holding an emulsion together using technology; we work within pretty nebulous boundaries.

Beyond that, I run the Noma Ferments Instagram account, publishing our successes and failures as way of informing the public about what we do. I’m also responsible for writing all of the recipes at Noma and standardizing them, serving as a sort of in-between for the Service Kitchen’s cooks and the Test Kitchen’s stack of handwritten notebooks. And, of course, [I’m in charge of] everything that went into and continues to go into the production of The Noma Guide to Fermentation; fielding questions; doing workshops and speaking events (spreading the gospel so to speak); as well as putting together the next book… whatever that may be.

What did you originally want to do when you started your career?

When I started cooking at the age of 18 in Toronto, I was surrounded by passionate young chefs who’d cooked for the likes of Ferran Adrià or Nobu Matsuhisa. I thought I was going to be running my own restaurant by the age of 27, doing my own version of fine dining food and expressing my own ideas. I’d set this sort of arbitrary goal for myself. Ironically, I didn’t even know how to cook back then, so while it was great to have dreams they were maybe a tad ill-informed.

Where I actually ended up at 27 was probably a much healthier place career-wise than venturing out on my own unprepared. I was the sous chef of Canada’s best restaurant, Hawksworth in Vancouver, helping to run dinner service, create menus, and be part of an amazing team. I don’t know if I’ll ever have my own restaurant anymore — my life has definitely deviated from the original plan — but you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Did you go to culinary school or college? If so, would you recommend it?

The program that got me into cooking in my last year of high school was an apprenticeship program that provided a crash course in cooking and then lots of on-the-job training in a high-end restaurant. I had the opportunity to continue on that path and get my Red Seal [a prestigious Canadian certification program endorsing a person’s skills and experience in their trade so they can work anywhere in the country without further examinations], but opted to keep working.

Still, my parents, Baby Boomers that they are, thought a piece of paper was valuable no matter where you went, so I enrolled in the culinary diploma program at a Toronto college. I didn’t want to give up my job, though, as the restaurant where I’d done my placement had hired me as a commis. So I did both and ended up working 90 hours a week between the two and getting really sick because of it after just a couple months. I had to make a tough decision, but opted to stay in the kitchen, which I think was the right choice. I was cooking circles around all my peers in school and, whenever we’d see new hires in the restaurant who’d been in school longer than I’d been cooking, I’d be cooking circles around them too.

Cooking can be theoretical, sure, anything can. But in practice, it is far more an example of the expert rule: Give me two hypothetical candidates, one with 10,000 hours in a kitchen and one with 10,000 hours spent reading cookbooks, and I can plainly tell you which one will succeed.

On top of that, I’ve met a lot of cooks who are crippled by the debt of expensive schools and come out the gates only to make minimum wage. Why pay for an education when you could be paid for it? The choice is clear for me.

That said — COMMIT. You won’t learn anything by hopping around restaurants every six months. You will by coming up the ranks of a solid establishment and learning what it means to depend on your peers, build something together. You’ll also learn the importance of teamwork doing everything from covering a sick dishwasher to calculating food cost.

What would you have done differently at school or paid more attention to?

Not attended in the first place!

Student loans are such a part of the conversation around higher education right now. Has your career trajectory been impacted by debt in any way?

Mine, no, because I opted to stay in the workplace instead of striving for a diploma. I did pay for that one semester of school I attended, but it wasn’t a significant amount. But I have seen a lot of young cooks accrue debt while slaving away in expensive cities they basically can’t afford to live in. While I’m sure cooking schools have improved greatly since I attended one in 2004 — and there are many passionate and well-intentioned instructors out there — there is no replacement for on-the-job experience. Make your mistakes on someone else’s dime. What is being a kitchen apprentice if not that?

What was your first job? What did it involve?

I was a commis at Rain Restaurant in Toronto. It was one of Canada’s best, and the Rubino brothers who ran it were painfully cool back in the early aughts. They had their own show about the restaurant on the Food Network! It was all very posh, pan-Asian cuisine. The food was very tall. There were a LOT of garnishes. I was effectively a commis, running one of two garde manger sections that plated all the cold accoutrements for the cooks on the hot line — lots of deep-fried crispy spindles, baskets made of julienned taro root, simple sauces like togarashi sabayon and the like.

I was 18 and had never had a job before in my life, let alone set foot in a fine dining restaurant. But my first sous chef, Luigi Encarnacion, a Filipino hip-hop nerd with a lot of style, took me under his wing. We’re still friends to this day, and he really did look out for me, teaching me how to act in a kitchen, what to care about, and how to do a good job. But most importantly, he taught me how to teach, which is something I’ve paid forward many times over. It’s the only way this industry propels itself: good cooks teaching promising apprentices how to become good cooks.

What was the biggest challenge you faced when you were starting out in the industry?

Pay. When I started cooking, I earned $564 Canadian every two weeks. My rent was $600. Looking back, even though I was young, my income was for sure below the poverty line. It was a struggle to save any money or even have food in the apartment, which I shared with three other guys. It’s a bit unjust how little we value the work that goes into producing food, whether that’s a young chef or a farm hand. We could all live without Facebook. We couldn’t live without food.

When was the first time you felt successful?

I think when I nailed my first medium rare steak after I’d been moved to the grill. There’s something powerful about realizing that you understand something ineffable about the world of cuisine — that someone’s taken the time to demonstrate to you how all of the minute pieces of experience fit together to do something tangible. I was on the new section for not even a week and the chef had asked to cook up a veal chop to try it with some new accoutrement. He sliced into it on the pass, and it really was a perfectly cooked medium rare. Not bad for a 19-year-old. And he told me as much.

Did you have any setbacks? What were they?

In my career? Not huge ones. There were instances where I felt as though I wasn’t working for a chef I truly wanted to learn from, or that things at a job felt as if they were stagnating. But overall, if I was ever in a less-than-ideal situation, I’d try to bounce back and not dwell on it or in it for too long. You always have the power to change your situation. It may feel uncomfortable at times, but that’s the point of moving forward.

What was the turning point that led to where you are now?

Taking the leap and applying to Noma. The winter before I sent off my application, I hunkered down and saved up enough cash to be able to afford making the jump overseas. Getting out of Canada —which, don’t get me wrong, has tons of great food but just isn’t on the same level internationally as places like Denmark, France, or the United States even — was the best thing I ever did in my career. It’s frightening to leave your whole support group behind, but if you trust in your own development, it always ends up working out.

What were the most important skills that got you there?

Reading. Self education. Determination. I can’t emphasize enough how valuable it is to teach yourself things no one else in your immediate surroundings will. And branch out — don’t only read about ONE topic. Be a generalist. Read about a lot of different things. We’re omnivores in our diets; we should all be in our learning, too.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

My ability to play, create, and explore. I feel so fortunate that Renė truly believes that R&D is worth its expense. Noma, I’m sure, could make it much further into the black each year if we didn’t have three salaries in a lab full of the restaurant’s most expensive equipment. BUT, Noma wouldn’t be Noma if that was the case, and everybody knows that. Everything we make for the restaurant — from pantry staples like pea miso or rose kombucha, to bespoke experiments like meadowsweet extract or white currant juice emulsions — always starts as an idea, an experiment in the mind of a chef. And that’s the most important (and favorite!) part of my job, coming up with an endless mental list of things to try out in the hopes of striking gold.

What’s one of the coolest things you’ve gotten to do?

In 2015, the lab’s team got to head down to Zimbabwe to assist Chido Govera, who runs a home for young girls and a mushroom farm, with the launch of her Future of Hope Foundation. It was 10 days of taking in the African landscape and foodscape, working with the most amazing children, togetherness, and the exchange of ideas. My job is always surprising me with interesting opportunities, but this trip will stick with me for years to come.

How are you making change in your industry?

There are so many people out there who achieve fame or notoriety for being in the right place at the right time, or are famous for being famous and have nothing of value to add to the wider conversation. Imagine if our rockstars were all scientists instead of vapid performers.

So if I’m getting any attention for my work, you can be damn sure I’m going to say exactly what I mean, and inform myself, at a deep level, about the issues at hand. If I’m inspiring cooks or amateurs to not just ferment, but to see the natural world through a grander lens of interconnected parts, then I’m doing all I could hope for.

What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve been given?

“You are your own business.” It’s absolutely true. No one out there will go the extra mile for you. No one will put in the extra work on your behalf to propel you further in the field. That’s something you can only do yourself. And the dividends do pay off eventually if you’re smart about it.

What advice would you give someone who wants your job?

My job is one of kind. My advice? Be one of a kind as well.

Amy McKeever is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
Photo of David Zilber: Asmund Sollihøgda
llustrations from the Noun Project: camera by Dhika Hernandita; covered dish by Made by Made; wine by Made by Made; lightbulb by Maxim Kulikov; hand writing by Pongsakorn.

Almost 20 years after “The Restaurant” made Rocco DiSpirito the world’s first reality-TV chef, his roller coaster career is still an object of fascination

At the turn of the century, the television executives of America made a discovery: People would do literally anything to be on television, and they would do it for free. Where with actors there were considerations like union rules and human rights, ordinary people were only too happy to be marooned on a desert island, locked in a house with total strangers, or compete to be a trophy wife — Survivor, Big Brother, and Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? all launched in the year 2000. The more dehumanizing the concept, it seemed, the higher the ratings. So it was only a matter of time before the executives decided to set one of these reality shows in a New York City restaurant.

Around the same time, the best young chef in New York was a man named Rocco DiSpirito; he was tall and beautiful, and his food was exquisitely refined, French with an Asian accent. In 1998, Ruth Reichl’s New York Times review of Union Pacific, where DiSpirito was the executive chef, began with an image of the woman at the table next to her moaning in ecstasy, and ended with three stars. Two years later, Gourmet, which rarely put chefs on the cover, put the 34-year-old DiSpirito on the cover. So when NBC decided to make a restaurant reality show, DiSpirito was a natural fit. “I knew he was the guy,” says Ben Silverman, the show’s co-creator.

Thus were born a pair of conjoined twins no surgeon could sever: Rocco’s on 22nd Street, the restaurant, and The Restaurant, the show. Both began in fanfare and ended in ignominy. In April 2003, DiSpirito announced an open call for staff while standing next to Al Roker on the Today show, and the next day, the line to apply for a job stretched around the corner of 22nd Street. This event would appear in the premiere episode of The Restaurant, which debuted on July 20, 2003. Its final episode aired less than a year later, on June 5, 2004. Almost two months after that, following a prolonged war with Rocco’s co-owner Jeffrey Chodorow (which forms the entire plot of the second season), DiSpirito was barred by the New York State Supreme Court from entering the premises of the restaurant that still bore his name. He’d be fired from Union Pacific two months later. Finally, Rocco’s on 22nd Street shut its doors for good in September 2004, away from the prying eyes of the cameras. Plans to expand Rocco’s into other states evaporated.

DiSpirito’s post-show trajectory is familiar: He went into the wilderness of television, racking up 92 credits as “Himself” on IMDb. He hawked frozen Bertolli dinners and cookware on QVC, wrote successful cookbooks, and did the occasional private dinner. He made it through the foxtrot and Viennese waltz on Dancing with the Stars. He was well-known, but within the industry, his name was synonymous with wasted potential: In 2007, writer Michael Ruhlman and the late Anthony Bourdain created a Golden Clog award called the “Rocco” to commemorate the “Worst Career Move by a Talented Chef.” A year later, Jeff Gordinier would write in the New York Times that “the word ‘sad’ seems to surface a lot when you bring up Mr. DiSpirito’s curious career arc.”

And then, in late 2018, the Standard Hotel in New York’s Meatpacking District announced that it had hired DiSpirito to run the kitchen at its revamped Grill — not as a consulting chef who conceives a menu and leaves his crew to work out the details, but as a fully vested-and-toqued executive chef. Reviews ranged from lukewarm to spirited: “Rocco’s latest gig turns out, somewhat astonishingly,” New York’s Adam Platt wrote, “to be the opposite of a train wreck.”

But just two weeks ago, the Standard Grill announced that the chef was out after less than a year on the job, with a representative telling Page Six that DiSpirito and the Standard were “parting ways mutually and amicably.” A story published in Food & Wine days after that did not shed light on the split, but its final graf teased that it’s not the end of the comeback: “DiSpirito isn’t walking away from the industry,” Kat Kinsman wrote. “Not this time.”

Silverman puts it succinctly, “The myth of Icarus is very central to Rocco’s journey.” So as the restaurant industry, ever-hungry for gossip, chews over DiSpirito’s latest story of nearing the sun and plummeting to earth, the question seems more relevant than ever: Just what did The Restaurant do to Rocco DiSpirito?

In 2003, there were two kinds of food television: the kind in which Julia Child or Emeril Lagasse stood behind a massive kitchen island and explained how to make chicken a la king, and the gastro-tourist kind, like Bourdain’s first show, A Cook’s Tour. There was no Top Chef, no Chopped, no Kitchen Nightmares; Iron Chef America wouldn’t premiere until 2004. The Restaurant was America’s first food-oriented reality show, and it’s striking now for everything that isn’t there. There are no confessionals where castmates talk to the camera in the present tense. There’s no food porn, with beautifully plated entrees slowly rotating on a white background, and there are no storylines surrounding burned garlic or gritty polenta. In fact, no one even imagined food could be dramatic, so on The Restaurant, food is basically an afterthought.

Instead, the show presents a business devolving into farce. DiSpirito (and Chodorow, the Mark Cuban of New York restaurant moguls) is served with two lawsuits, one regarding the restaurant’s name, the other its location. DiSpirito often wears a yellow trucker hat with his name on it. Staff training devolves into DiSpirito playing a drinking game with servers, and ends with one of the more desperate-to-be-on-TV servers drinking an entire bucket of spit-back wine. The restaurant opens (after having been built in just five weeks), and during service, part of the kitchen bursts into flame, sending smoke billowing up into the dining room. Food takes hours to arrive on tables, and when it does, it is stone-cold; DiSpirito expediting in the kitchen is a truly frantic experience, an escalating arpeggio of the word “clams” screamed over and over. And that’s just the first two episodes.

“We all watched the first episode at the restaurant,” says Lonn Coward, a server on the show. “And afterwards I was like, ‘Guys, does our television show suck?’”

Uzay Tumer, floor captain and later a Rocco’s manager, was more succinct: “It was a complete disaster.”

“[The producers] did a lot to make the restaurant seem like a clusterfuck,” says Chodorow, who barely appears in the first season. (DiSpirito declined multiple interview requests for this article.) “I was upset about it, because people knew I was involved and I had friends who called me and said, ‘Jesus, that’s how you do a restaurant?’” Chodorow, who by 2003 was already a major player in the New York restaurant world, told me that he hadn’t wanted to be part of a reality show. But when DiSpirito approached him to put up the money for this new venture, Chodorow says he “liked the idea of a three-star chef who cooks very interesting food at Union Pacific [going] back to his roots to do an Italian-American restaurant with his mother.”

The Restaurant did well in the ratings, and as someone who worked in service for years, I found the show as enthralling as a demolition derby. But from the beginning, Rocco’s — the restaurant — suffered from a split personality. The basic problem was that Rocco’s was supposed to be a normal restaurant when the cameras were off: The real money for Chodorow and DiSpirito wasn’t in the show, it was in the business, and they put actual effort into making it work; Chodorow says he thought the concept could expand nationwide. But the space was fully built with television in mind. The producers concealed cameras in every pillar, the dining room was a “shitshow” for sound, and with the kitchen in the basement, physically moving food was a nightmare. With the benefit of hindsight, Chodorow now calls the Rocco’s location a “restaurant killer.” And then there was the hiring.

While the opening episode shows the line to apply for jobs stretching around the block, there were actually two lines. Carrie Keranen, who was a server in both seasons, says, “there was the reality show line and the ‘legit’ line.” The experienced professionals went straight to meet with Laurent Saillard, the restaurant’s general manager. The ones who just wanted to be on TV, she says, ran through a “gauntlet” of producers before meeting Saillard.

But even the experienced professionals, says showrunner Jamie Bruce, had been pre-vetted by producers. “We had 40 to 50 people we liked, and [when we did the open call], those people showed up,” he says. “I didn’t think I could force them on Rocco — so I did everything I could to get him to choose them, without making him choose them. And we got some of the people we wanted.”

The effect, however, was exactly what Bruce — who’s also worked on seasons of Survivor and Restaurant Startup — and his boss, Mark Burnett, who had made his name creating Survivor and turning it into a ratings juggernaut of backstabbing and human frailty, had wanted. “They put professionals with amateurs and put them on TV,” Tumer says. “Even professionals started behaving unprofessionally, myself included. It was a total mess.”

“I was definitely told by the producers that the reason the reality side approved me was because they were hoping I’d hook up with someone,” says Keranen, who did indeed wind up having a relationship on the show. The producers would promise staff that they’d planned epic story arcs around them — some got love stories, others were going to climb the professional ladder — but one after another, the plotlines all fizzled out.

Most of the staff were more intent on doing their actual jobs than mugging for the camera, because NBC wasn’t paying them a dime. The only person who was paid to be on The Restaurant was DiSpirito himself; Chodorow, despite being a full co-star on Season 2, says he was not paid. Tumer and Keranen tried to negotiate for payment before the second season, to no avail. (Flash-forward 15 years, and the stars of Vanderpump Rules are clearing around $15,000 per episode.) Several Rocco’s staffers told me they’d made less money when the cameras were around, because their sections shrank to accommodate filming and they’d receive fewer tips.

Since a show like this had never been attempted before, producers came up with the idea of bringing in casted customers to ensure there would be ample story, in case the servers didn’t deliver the dramatic goods. The front of the restaurant was for regular diners. But there were two large tables in the back, fully wired for sound and set aside for people the producers would bring in. One episode features a little boy named Frankie who spews a stream of pickup lines at a waitress, and then hits on the three hostesses. DiSpirito warns him, “They come as a team, these three.”

“Really. Buy one, get two free?” says Frankie, who is 10. The viewer, presumably, is supposed to find this charming.

But there’s one scene on The Restaurant that encapsulates everything that was warped about it, and reality TV in general, in the early 2000s. In the sixth episode, one of the curated back tables is occupied by four African-American women who appear to be in their 40s, dressed to kill. Coward, the only featured black server on the show, waits on their table. Footage that aired shows the group groping and fondling Coward. “They were poking at my crotch, slapping my butt,” says Coward now. “I felt really uncomfortable.” Watching it, the discomfort (and potential harassment complaint) is obvious, but the scene is played for laughs by the producers. The women unbutton his shirt, stroke his face, pinch his nipples. They almost lick him.

“You need to sit on my lap,” says one.

“I was trying not to embarrass them,” Coward remembers. “I sped them through the meal. I felt like a prostitute. [The producers] gave me that table on purpose.”

Other staff members confirmed this. “They were brought in to attack Lonn,” Tumer says. Saillard agrees. “I have no doubt that the producers were responsible for sending him ... to the table,” he says. Bruce disputes the characterization that the women were brought in to cause drama with Coward, and is firm that had Coward spoken to him, another server would have handled the table. Coward says that he repeatedly asked his manager, Saillard, off camera, “to take me away and give the table to someone else, but he said, ‘Just get them to dessert and Rocco will take over.’ So I did their desserts and walked away.” Saillard does not dispute Coward’s account. But regardless, it was Bruce and his team who chose to broadcast what came next: DiSpirito, as promised, takes over the table, and parks himself on one of the women. “You girls want something to squeeze?” he says. “You’re wasting your time with [Coward]. His girlfriend is a six-two boy with” — he gestures to his penis.

For that episode’s airing, Coward hosted a big watch party at his apartment. “I watched Rocco out me on national television,” he says. “It went really quiet at my house when he did that. Everyone was like, ‘That’s kind of messed up, man.’” Though Coward was out to friends and his co-workers, Coward had never mentioned his sexuality on camera, nor did producers know whether or not he was out at home. “My mom goes to church,” says Coward. “She lives in the South. If I had not been out, it would have been disastrous for me. They knew how I was in New York, but they had no idea how I was in Virginia. They really could have screwed things up for me.”

Not that there was anything Coward could have done about it. Fred Price, sommelier at Union Pacific and beverage director at Rocco’s, remembers being “given contracts to sign, 20 to 25 pages, and it basically said, ‘We the producers can do anything we want. We can embarrass you, humiliate you, do whatever.’”

To make sure there was as much embarrassing and humiliating material as possible, abundant use was made of reality TV’s best friend: alcohol. “We were hungover every day,” remembers Tumer. “We would shoot for six weeks and we would be drunk the entire time. The producers would take us out and say, ‘Open bar, drinks on us, go crazy!’ Then ask us very pointed questions.”

“We’d go out and tray after tray of shots would show up,” says Coward. “There was a lot of bad stuff.”

While there was no policy of inebriating cast members, Bruce concedes that it’s very possible that the young, ambitious associate producers who tailed the cast at night could have organized it themselves. “[The cast members] felt manipulated, which they were on some level, but they also participated wholeheartedly,” he says. Tumer agrees. “We were having fun and living in New York City and on TV. We were C-list celebrities for 15 seconds.”

It’s easy to think that everyone involved with that show knew what they were getting into. But in 2003, reality TV was still an unknown — even to the producers. “This was the early days of reality,” Bruce says. “We didn’t script shit and tell them, ‘Do this.’ This had never been done before ... In today’s world, everything would have been planned out.”

“We weren’t as savvy about reality TV as we are now,” Price says. This was a common theme among former Rocco’s staff: They thought they were going to be on a show about a restaurant. They didn’t entirely understand that they were going to be the show. The producers seemed to know nothing about restaurants, nor did they care. “I feel like everyone is in on the game now,” says Keranen, “but on this one, no one really understood the game.”

Least of all DiSpirito himself.

DiSpirito shot to fame on the subtlety and sophistication of his cooking at Union Pacific, but producers didn’t think scallops and sea urchin would set middle America on fire. “You couldn’t do a series unless the environment was accessible and relatable,” says Silverman. Instead, Rocco’s was conceived as an homage to the red-sauce Italian joint, centered around his mother Nicolina’s meatballs. “Mama,” 77 years old at the time, would be in the kitchen every day making those meatballs — hundreds of them. (I’ve made those meatballs. They are work.) DiSpirito himself was rarely in there. “I had to keep recycling footage to make it look like he was in the kitchen,” Bruce says. That absence caused real anger among the restaurant staff, especially the cooks, who thought they were going to be learning from a celebrated New York chef, not his mother.

Instead of in the kitchen, The Restaurant shows DiSpirito spending all night, every night, bathing in the adulation of his fans. In his recent interview with Kinsman in Food & Wine, DiSpirito talks about his lifelong struggles with anxiety, noting that in order to better perform the role of charming guests (with or without cameras), he worked with an acting coach to script interactions. The lessons proved effective, at least on the surface: He swans around pressing the flesh, often literally — he sticks his tongue in a woman’s ear, and she runs her hand under his shirt — in a blazer and collared shirt with the top few buttons undone. Women pinch and kiss his boyish cheeks, and he flirts relentlessly. He does this because he knows that the reason people want to come to Rocco’s is to see Rocco DiSpirito — not to eat his food.

He’s not wrong: The people who come to the restaurant (all of whom signed waivers at the door if they came while cameras were there) seem like they would eat him if they could, and one gets the feeling he’d gladly let them. DiSpirito described that tension to Kinsman: “How do you balance being the thing and promoting the thing that you are trying to be? You have to market more than master. In our industry, that tension is the source of many, many problems and Xanax prescriptions.”

Yet for viewers, DiSpirito became a reality TV trope, one which must have come as a shock to him: the villain. When one server fractures his arm, DiSpirito forbids him to work the door, even though he desperately needs to make money. “I’m sorry you have a broken arm and everything,” DiSpirito tells him, “but restaurants are supposed to uplift people, make them feel good — not remind them of life’s tragedies.” He calls one server a “fuckup” to a table that has gone unfed for two hours. To another irate table he jokes that to make it better “I fired two waiters.”

NBC showed no mercy to their newly minted reality star, either. Very quickly — around the first time the kitchen caught fire (it would happen again in Season 2) — the producers understood that they had a fiasco on their hands, and set about making sure they got one. “When there’s a train wreck,” Bruce says, “you follow the train wreck.” But what they never meant to do, Bruce says, is destroy the restaurant entirely.

Silverman, who had envisioned The Restaurant as a warm, friendly show (akin to the American version of The Office, which he executive-produced), speaks of this part bitterly. “The big mistake in hiring Mark Burnett’s team [from Survivor] was that I didn’t expect him to torture Rocco.” For instance, one night, a critic came in. DiSpirito made it clear that she was obviously to be given the VIP treatment, but producers decided it would be more compelling if the most incompetent waitress were to take the table. “[Rocco] wants his A-plus waiter there,” says Silverman, “and Mark and Jamie [Bruce] send in this dipshit.” Not only would this make for pass-the-popcorn television (indeed, the reviewer, Linda Stasi, is shown sitting stone-faced at DiSpirito’s jokes, and describes her food as “piping cold”), it would also be guaranteed to drive DiSpirito nuts.

Silverman is clear that Burnett’s actions fueled DiSpirito’s “giant mistrust of all the production team,” and “that mistrust fueled conflict between Rocco and Mark and Jamie.” Bruce rejects the word “torture,” but concedes that they would “throw wrenches” in the operation of the restaurant. “It wasn’t a restaurant,” he says. “It was a set.” (Burnett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

In the second season, DiSpirito became deeply suspicious of not just the producers but also Chodorow, who wound up becoming a focus of the show. The restaurant itself began losing serious money — over $600,000 in under a year — because even though it was packed, expenses were ludicrously high (to this day, Chodorow still has the offending numbers at his fingertips, like a $5,000 price tag for 2,000 business cards), and tables weren’t turning, because food took forever to exit the kitchen and everyone was waiting around to see the show’s star, who by that point was refusing to come out of his office. Chodorow is adamant that the restaurant could have been saved, but that DiSpirito refused to accept his help.

The second season mostly focuses on Chodorow’s very real efforts to gain control of the restaurant. Even this, though, was done on NBC’s schedule: Bruce told me that Chodorow actually wanted to start the takeover three weeks before shooting started. “I begged him to wait until the cameras were running,” said Bruce, and it worked.

“It was truly a nightmare,” Chodorow says. “It was actually worse than you saw on TV.” According to sworn affidavits from the 2004 lawsuit, when a manager displeased DiSpirito by refusing to send a busboy up to his office with a bottle of water, DiSpirito screamed, “If you set foot in my restaurant again, you are a fucking dead man ... I am going to fucking kill you.”

But the producers didn’t want the audience to fully turn on the show’s putative hero. “We were getting pressure from above saying, ‘Rocco cannot go down in flames,’” says Kate Hall, DiSpirito’s personal producer on Season 2, so she spent the whole second season trying to get DiSpirito to redeem himself in the kitchen. “We’d be like, ‘There’s a problem in the kitchen, can you go down there and see what’s going on, and we’ll cover it.’ And he’d go downstairs and take an onion and chop it beautifully, and throw it in a pan and toss in salt artfully, swirl it around the pan, and then turn to us and go, ‘How was that?’ Then he’d walk away again.’”

Even as Rocco’s on 22nd was hemorrhaging money, The Restaurant producers wanted a Season 3. After a judge barred DiSpirito from the premises, Bruce told me that he offered to rent the restaurant across the street, and let DiSpirito compete against Chodorow, his new nemesis. By that time, it was too late. “I told Rocco, you’re not a chef anymore, you’re a TV star, embrace it! Get to work! He looked at me like I was the devil ... this blank look,” Bruce says. “I knew at that moment I’d lost him for good.”

It’s hard to blame him. DiSpirito believed he was making something that would cement him as one of the new celebrity chefs that were being created almost out of thin air in 2003. But when the show aired, he was depicted as incompetent and distracted, and in the second season viewers were treated to a plunge into chaos, crying, and consultants. By the time DiSpirito’s doomed battle with Chodorow reaches its climax, the whole thing just feels forlorn. One of the last episodes ends with DiSpirito staring into the window of his own restaurant, tears in his eyes.

The Grill at the Standard is a brand-new space, but it has a lush old-New York feel to it, with wood paneling and low lighting. The servers are in white blazers, the runners wear vests, and the service is exquisite — attentive, swift, well-informed. It is also, I should note, remarkably expensive; a meal for two can shoot well past $250. DiSpirito, early on in his tenure there, still struggled with getting food out of the kitchen in a timely manner: As Eater NY critics Ryan Sutton and Robert Sietsema noted in their joint April 2019 review, they waited nearly an hour for a lackluster amuse-bouche to arrive, while VIP tables next to them “plowed through multiple dishes.”

Critics seemed surprised at the restaurant’s quality. In March, New York’s Platt gave the restaurant an 87/100 score, praising a shrimp-and-truffle risotto “which I’m still dreaming about days later.” In a two-star New York Times review in early April, Pete Wells suggested the chef was back in form, writing “Standard Grill is ... so much better than almost any restaurant serving a comparable menu of grilled meats and chilled seafood, that it’s foolish to wish for the return of the same Mr. DiSpirito who gave us Union Pacific.” Sutton and Sietsema were decidedly more mixed.

DiSpirito’s Peconic Bay scallops and uni is one of the dishes that made his name, and I can see why: When I visited the Standard in February, it was subtle and even challenging, commanding the diner to shut out noise and concentrate, hard, on the texture and flavor. Even more flooring, however, was the humble salad of wild lettuces and Italian chicories. It was winter, and we saw nothing we recognized as chicory. It didn’t matter. The salad was a loosely organized confederation of gaily colored lettuce leaves, and it was bang-your-head-against-the-table good.

Even though it was a Saturday night, DiSpirito was nowhere to be seen in the dining room, and our waiter confirmed that he was in the kitchen every day. As the meal went on, my dining companion — my father — and I ate a fregola somehow engineered from water chestnut and chickpea flour, which was sharp and clean and briny. My father was a restaurant architect for more than 30 years, and had worked closely with DiSpirito: He and his partner Larry Bogdanow designed Union Pacific, the restaurant that made DiSpirito’s name. My father is, to put it mildly, not a Rocco DiSpirito fan after working with him, but eating this salad, he began to soften. A strain of charity leached into his memories. Good food will do that to you. “Maybe this is where he should have been all along,” my father murmured.

For a moment, that was DiSpirito’s plan. At the end of the show’s run, when his failure is almost complete, DiSpirito and his mother talk about finding a new restaurant space. “A little place downtown, where the kitchen and the dining room are almost the same space,” he says, somewhere that he could have begun to redeem himself through his cooking — somewhere like the restaurant we were eating in that February night.

But why, then, did it take him 15 years? He told Grub Street in a January interview, vaguely, that “I didn’t feel like I had a meaningful contribution to add to the restaurant scene, until I realized that my contribution would be this.” To Kinsman, DiSpirito is more candid, saying that after his mother Nicolina’s heart attack in 2005 he reshuffled his priorities, and caring for her health took precedence. “I didn’t really think about what the costs were, what the trade-offs were,” he told Food & Wine. Nicolina DiSpirito died in 2013; two years after that, DiSpirito says he underwent an emergency surgery after years of neglecting his own health. “The emergency diskectomy — a kind of spinal surgery — for his acute sciatica was something DiSpirito had dreaded for his entire adult life, and it left him as an invalid for a time,” Kinsman writes.

Chodorow believes part of the delay was that “Rocco became very, very famous and successful very fast, and I think it overwhelmed him.” In a wide-ranging conversation, Chodorow went to great lengths to stress to me that after their legal battle ended, DiSpirito behaved ethically and responsibly, and that there is no ill will between them.

Lonn Coward took longer to forgive DiSpirito, but as the years have passed, he’s softened. “I’m almost certain that he looks back, and I wonder if he feels some kind of remorse,” he says. “I feel like ... he was scarred. If it was traumatic for me, it had to be traumatic for him. He was at his peak, and he let the fame take over. And that was sad to watch.” Like many I spoke to, Coward felt real sympathy for DiSpirito when Nicolina died.

Silverman, who considers DiSpirito a friend, says that DiSpirito has “evolved since the show ended. I’m glad he’s had the success that he’s had.” Bruce, for his part, is most mournful that the show itself has vanished from popular memory. He still considers it the best work he’s done. Moreover, he regrets that DiSpirito was never able to see the opportunity in front of him. “He could have been [Gordon] Ramsay,” Bruce says.

But by the time the show was coming to an end, to have reached the heights he’d achieved as a chef, DiSpirito had to love the grind, the mania, the hours, the hospitality. I imagine by the time he was barred from Rocco’s on 22nd (where his mother continued to work until it closed in 2004), that love was dead. After watching The Restaurant, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he never set foot in another restaurant again.

It is not a sin to want to be famous. In fact, for a chef, it is one of the more effective paths out of knee-grinding, low-paying work. Today, the industry is finally questioning how older non-celebrity chefs are supposed to be able to get out of the kitchen and successfully retire. To Price, who still considers DiSpirito a friend, DiSpirito’s only mistake was trying to do that in a new way. “I think he wanted to try [the show] to see what else was out there,” he says, “to see how else might a chef exist and practice his craft besides being in the kitchen of a restaurant 14 hours a day, six days a week.”

In a 2004 New York magazine interview that ran shortly before the show ended, DiSpirito contended with that question directly:

“I want to sell my books and products. Is there something wrong with selling out? Every chef is looking to cash in on his brand and notoriety. I don’t have a brand like Martha, but negative press certainly affects it. Sure, we got letters saying, ‘You were so mean on the show.’ It bothers me. I want to be loved just like everybody else, but people should judge my products on their merits and not figure out what is right for me. Put me next to any chef, any time, and I’ll be better than them. I can cook. Let’s say I am overexposed. Should I be judged poorly for it? Purism is boring. They say I want to be an actor. I’ve turned down modeling and acting jobs. Was it wrong for Da Vinci to want to sculpt after painting?”

It’s an arresting analogy — not only because of the swaggering comparison, but because only one surviving sculpture is attributable to Leonardo, maybe. Though he dedicated years to designing two gargantuan equestrian monuments, he insisted that the colossal horse had to be cast in one single bronze piece. But this was far beyond the technological capacity of 15th-century Milanese artisans, and despite his best efforts, the project ended in failure. The horses were never built. Genius has limits.

So maybe the analogy has some merit after all.

In The Restaurant’s fifth episode, there’s a scene where Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert comes in with Anthony Bourdain in what is one of the strangest, and somehow most affecting, moments in the whole show.

At this point, both men are just setting out on their roads to fame. Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential had come out three years earlier; his Food Network travel show A Cook’s Tour has aired but No Reservations won’t debut until 2005. Ripert has four stars from the Times, but his coronation by Michelin is still two years away. The cameras keep their distance, but we hear their conversation. Some dishes Bourdain pronounces “great”; others “utterly blow.” But mostly, they debate DiSpirito’s selling out.

Ripert is against it. “In my culture,” he says, “you do a great product, you don’t have to almost prostitute yourself.”

“I disagree,” says Bourdain. “The product is no longer enough. Look at Rocco, he knows.” The camera cuts to DiSpirito bantering with a woman, joking that “she’s making me an indecent proposal.”

Ripert ripostes, “As a chef, my first duty is to cook well.”

Bourdain is more sympathetic, even admiring the circus around him. “And you know what your second job is, and has always been going back to Escoffier, going back to the Romans? It’s to be a motherfucking hustler.”

They’re so totally out of place there, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suddenly summoned to Elsinore. And of course, they’re both right. Here are two men whose integrity would soon made them icons, set amid a scene of galloping tackiness. They are in this world, but not of it, somehow. I found myself wishing that they could have spent the whole series there, at a small two-top with a bottle of red wine, debating the proceedings like a Greek chorus.

And now, the punchline: The Restaurant was NBC’s first attempt to take a minor New York celebrity and turn him into a global icon; it wound up nearly ruining the man’s life. But one year later, Mark Burnett and Jamie Bruce tried again, with a different minor New York celebrity, on a new show. They called it The Apprentice.

Samuel Ashworth is a regular contributor to the Washington Post Magazine, and his fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Hazlitt, Longreads, NYLON, Barrelhouse, Catapult, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Rumpus. He is currently working on a novel about the life and death of a chef, told through his autopsy.
Fact-checked by Andrea López Cruzado
Copy edited by Rachel Kreiter

Plus, how calorie counts on menus affect fast-food orders, and more news to start your day

The company had to walk back an email about the fake holiday

“National [X] Day” holidays are typically invented for marketing, which is what fast food chain Chick-fil-A was relying on when it sent an email to customers about National Sandwich Day on November 3. There’s just one problem—November 3 is a Sunday, a day on which Chick-fil-A is famously closed. “We recently sent an email that included a message about National Sandwich Day, which naturally we were very excited about,” the company wrote in a follow-up email. “We didn’t realize it falls on Sunday when we are closed. We apologize for the confusion and hope to see you soon (Monday-Saturday).”

Competitor Popeyes of course piled on to the mistake, tweeting about the email, and reminding customers that its much-anticipated chicken sandwich returns on that very Sunday.

Guess Chick-fil-A will have to invent another new commercial-cum-holiday to recover from this blunder. Or it could simply go on being wildly successful.

And in other news...

• Restaurants already partnered with Grubhub are mad about the company adding new restaurants without their permission, as those restaurants aren’t subject to Grubhub’s fees. [NY Post]
• In its most recent attempt to compete with chicken’s popularity, McDonald’s is planning on adding chicken to its breakfast menu nationally. [Insider]
• A new law in Utah that raises the limits of how alcoholic beer can (a holdover from Prohibition) be will go into effect. Now, the state can sell beer up to 4% ABV, a compromise with the influential Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. [AP]
• Australian authorities found a bunch of meth hidden inside bottles of Sriracha, enough for four million doses. [Vice]
• A new report says those calorie counts on fast food menus do get people to order fewer calories...at least for a while. [Chicago Tribune]
• A bartender won $50,000 after a customer left a Powerball ticket instead of a tip. It’s great, but also it would have really sucked if it wasn’t a winning ticket and the bartender got no tip at all! [Insider]
• Bee Wilson asks if it really matters whether food is “authentic.” [WSJ]

• All AM Intel Coverage [E]

Professional baker Erin McDowell owns at least 25 GIR spatulas

When professional baker and cookbook author Erin McDowell is in what she calls “serious baking mode,” you can expect to see her most useful kitchen tools nearby. Her favorites include a bench scraper (“I throw flour everywhere”), really sharp scissors (“I like to use Joyce Chen ones”), pre-cut parchment paper (“because nobody’s got time to tear things off a roll”), and her beloved collection of GIR silicone spatulas, which she uses for everything from scrambling eggs to perfecting recipes for her upcoming pie cookbook.

McDowell owns an estimated 25 GIR spatulas, ranging in size and color, spread across two kitchens at her home in New Jersey. “I’m nerdily in love with these,” she says of the spatulas, which come in 16 colors in mini, skinny, ultimate, and the 16-inch pro size (good for when McDowell makes a giant pot of chili). “When I have a kitchen tool I really love, it acts like an extension of the hand,” she says. “This is a legit love story — I’ll shout it from the rooftops.”

For McDowell, who’s also a recipe developer and food stylist, the perfect spatula should meet the following requirements: First, it must be easy-to-clean. “Other spatulas have a handle with a head that comes off, and you’re just begging for gunk to get in between,” she says. Second, the spatula should have “that perfect level of bend.” The flexibility of the GIR spatulas means that McDowell can use GIR’s mini to scrape out every last morsel of jam or mayo from a jar. Third, the spatula shouldn’t chip easily. “We’ve all had spatulas where chunks have come off,” she says. “I use mine to clean out the food processor where the blade is, and even when it’s gotten nicked, it doesn’t break off.”

But perhaps one of McDowell’s favorite features of the GIR spatulas is how easy they are to organize. “When I was growing up, my mom used to write in Sharpie on the handle of the spatula, ‘sweet’ or ‘savory. But that gets worn off with time,” McDowell says. “You only need one time of having garlic whipped cream to not ever want that again.” In McDowell’s kitchens, the sweet spatulas are gray and the savory are black. For photoshoots, McDowell’s go-to is white. “I fully acknowledge that it’s super boring, but I use them in photographs and white goes with everything,” she says. But one day, you might just spot a pink spatula in one of her books. “I’m such a fan.”

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Eater’s Digest talks to the executive chef at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Hospital food has long been the worst of captive audience cuisines. Outpacing even airplane food in its terribleness, a tray full of JELL-O cups and reconstituted chicken broth plopped in front of a patient is an insult added to literal injury.

It didn’t use to be this way. Preparing nourishing food for the sick was once a domestic art and an essential part of caring for the ill. Whole cookbooks were dedicated to this corner of cookery, and even the word “restaurant” refers to the restorative broths prepared for sick patients in 18th-century France.

We’ve fallen a long way — but one hospital is on a mission to provide appetizing food to its patients as they battle and recover from grave illness. Patients and their families at St. Jude Children’s Hospital aren’t subjected to the same sad boilerplate menus most hospital patients are; instead, good food is part of the treatment plan at St. Jude’s. And as all their patients are children, they’re not afraid of the whims of kids’ picky appetites.

So Michael Vetro, St. Jude’s executive chef, is bringing home to the hospital by recreating family recipes on-demand. From dal and naan paratha to enchiladas and Korean-style Silkie chicken stew cooked in a clay pot, Vetro never says no when a kid’s got a craving. He’s even invited moms and dads into the hospital’s kitchen to show him how to cook their children’s favorites, he said. It’s an approach with dual benefits: allowing kids to feel comforted at their sickest and parents to feel empowered when their child’s care is largely out of their hands.

There’s an à la carte menu available to them at all times, but Vetro recognizes that when you’re sick, sometimes only the comforts of home will do — and those comforts taste different dependent on where you’re from.

On this episode of Eater’s Digest, he tells hosts Amanda Kludt and Daniel Geneen about his approach to caring through cooking.

Listen and subscribe to Eater’s Digest on Apple Podcasts.

Below, a lightly edited transcript of Amanda and Daniel’s interview with Chef Michael Vetro and Gena Kim, St. Jude’s supervisor of patient services.

Amanda: So tell us, why is St. Jude making an effort to make good food part of the treatment process?

Chef Vetro: Well, one, the connotation of hospital food has never been something that is very positive. But two, as restaurants have gotten better, expectations have increased for dining. And so now as the guest comes in, we want to provide them with a more of a restaurant experience versus what you would originally think of as a hospital experience.

Amanda: I notice you call them guests rather than patients.

Chef Vetro: Oh, without a doubt. I think that the hospitality industry is still the hospitality industry, so to call someone a patient is labeling them. But at St. Jude, we serve the entire population. So not only do we have patients and families, but we also have all of the support operations staff. So your plumbers, your mechanics, everybody it takes to make the place run. And then of course all the researchers, doctors, nurses, administration, that all comes along with it. So we truly do have guests. It’s, not just about room service, it’s about every individual that comes through our doors.

Amanda: What from your background working in restaurants, have you brought to this role, working at the hospital?

Chef Vetro: I’ve worked extensively in catering as well as some smaller operations. So I think what I take is from the catering aspect is the level of service, the way you would build a buffet, the expectation of garnishing a plate. I spent a few years in the country club scene and from that you have that top level of customer service. The [mentality of] it’s never say no, it’s how can I help you? How can I make this work? The bottom line is that the hospitality industry is customer service. Secondary is high-quality food served correctly, consistently that looks appetizing and tastes excellent. So customer service, customer service, customer service.

Amanda: When you think about your customer, oftentimes it’s a kid who’s very sick and in treatment and doesn’t want to eat, doesn’t feel like eating. How do you convince them to eat? What are some of the your methods there?

Gena Kim: That’s mostly what I do on a day-to-day basis is taking care of our patients that are in the rooms. I would compare it to a hotel room service where they’re able to place an order based on their menu and their diets and we deliver it to them at their bedside. It’s not like a traditional hospital where everyone’s getting turkey for lunch, and I think that’s been something that’s really unique at St. Jude to help our patients that are very ill. At least they can pick out what they want to eat and it’s not abnormal for them to not find what they want, especially if they’re from different parts of the country, different parts of the world.But if they want something outside of the menu, that’s where I come in and I can go and meet with the families and the patients, and get a recipe from them. And then I take it back to Chef Vetro, and he’s able to either himself or have cooks to prepare this item. And it goes as far as we might have to get special ingredients, we might have to go grocery shopping for this patient. And that’s really how we get our patients to eat.

Amanda: Chef Vetro, can you give us an example of when you’ve taken the recipe from a family and turn it into a meal for a patient?

Chef Vetro: I think one that sticks out to me the most is I had a family, an Indian family. And so she came down and she basically chatted with us and said, “We trust the doctors entirely. But I am the mother and I believe that nutrition is my responsibility to my child. And may I come in and work with you?” And she came together, gave us a list of ingredients we made naan parathas and some dal, and we put together some butter chicken. And she came into the kitchen and actually showed us how to make those items. And so then we could reproduce them on demand. And as Gina mentioned it, they can call down and they can order what they wish.

But another thing that’s important is that we don’t restrict them to just three meals a day. If they have a craving or they feel that they want to eat, they pick up the phone and call us and we have it ready for them. These are children and they say, “My tummy hurts. I don’t feel like this. I want that.” Where one person’s remedy for a cold is not another, somebody may say it’s scrambled eggs and toast. Someone else might say that it is Lipton cup of noodles. Someone else may say that it’s something spicy that’s going to get them over their ailment. So we are basically prepared for anything.

Amanda: How does nutrition play a role when it comes up against like the deliciousness or the desires of the patient? How do you work in their health needs?

Chef Vetro: We want parents to be parents. So throughout their day they’re being told what to do, what they can do and what they can’t. But one of the few things that the parent has control of is what they allow their child to eat. So if it falls within what clinical has said that they can have to eat, they’re basically allowed to have that. Because sometimes if you need that cheeseburger with the extra onions, well then that’s what you need because sometimes they just need calories. That is a big thing. You have to remember chemotherapy and some of the other treatments that they go through affect them. It affects their taste buds. There was a study done by clinical not too long ago, and they used I think a series of five emojis. And over the course of the span of chemotherapy, they tested salt and sour and by the end they needed much more intense flavors than they did in the beginning. And so you have to find that happy medium where sometimes caloric intake is, trumps the need for exact vitamin counts.

Daniel: Have you had that magic moment where you get a kid in and the parents are like, whatever you do, they’re not going to eat and you work a little magic and you just feel fantastic?

Kim: There was a time where a patient wanted enchiladas. That’s all she was talking about. And the mom gave us a recipe and chef was able to, we actually invited the patient down into our kitchen and assembled it together. So room service put up a nice tray together with some desserts, her favorite beverage, we took it to her room. And the best thing is when you go up to pick up a tray and the plates empty. She ate everything.

Amanda: That’s amazing.

Daniel: That’s so cool.

Amanda: And how many patients, how many guests, patients, and staffers do you guys serve?

Chef Vetro: So we’re actually, we just crept over 4,000 a day. And then I think from the room service perspective, I think we’re at ...

Kim: About 70 patients a day.

Chef Vetro: Food services has roughly 100 employees and it takes every single one of them to get it moving. If it wasn’t for our dish room attendance and our room service techs who deliver the food, to the three different levels of cooks that all prepare hundreds of portions every single day with the 4,000 guests that come through that it is not just Gina and I that do it all. It is a small village that takes care of this campus, and every single one of them puts their heart and soul into every dish that they make.

Amanda: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and thank you for everything that you do. This is super fascinating.

Chef Vetro: Well thanks again for the opportunity because we love what we do and it’s a lot of fun to share it because I don’t think anybody realizes what’s going on in Memphis, Tennessee. Taking care of all these children and information that’s shared around the world to help others.