To his mind, that's what chefs do. And that's who and what he is to his core. He had to get back in the kitchen. I started doing that in , and of course back then, no one thought it made sense. Over a decade later, Stephen Brandman did. He had to make his peace with that, even if it still makes him nervous to this day. They've got an executive chef and chef de cuisine and pastry chef; it's not going to be like a normal restaurant opening.
I'm going to have all this support. Those long hours are a different proposition in your 50s than it is in your 20s or 30s, and DiSpirito knew that down to his often-aching bones. When he bent down to get the truffles out of the lowboy, getting up was hard again, and he was still dealing with the last vestiges of the drop foot.
Restaurant work is physically and emotionally taxing, and many nights he just wanted to get home and sink onto the couch with his dogs, Captain and Lenny. But he was still strong, he said, and full of the passion that had always driven him.
It comes through in the food, I told him. The scallop and uni in mustard oil and tomato water sent me rocketing back to that lunch at Union Pacific a decade and a half before, and then a cleverly sharp beet tartare snapped me back to the present.
I genuinely teared up at an ingenious dairy-free creamed Swiss chard—a dish I'd assumed would be off the menu for me forever, due to my deeply annoying gut-based dietary restrictions.
I ate with abandon because I knew DiSpirito had done everything he could to make sure it was as safe as it was sensually glorious, and I settled in against my husband's shoulder in the cab on the way home, thoroughly contented. He'd never gotten to eat at Union Pacific, and I was giddy that I'd gotten to share Rocco's food with him.
When DiSpirito parted ways with The Standard Grill this week, just a few months after that transcendent meal which I found out via a news story minutes before the plane I was on took off , this time I knew he hadn't disappeared. Because this time, when I landed, there was a text from him apologizing for not telling me sooner, saying he hoped we could talk.
Contracts exist for various reasons, including making paths by which both parties may exit gracefully. But DiSpirito isn't walking away from the industry. Not this time. The past year behind a restaurant stove reignited something inside him, and he knows more than ever that he cannot live without it. He's tired, having worked days out of the past , and he may need a moment to figure out where he's going next—but there is definitely a next.
I know it will be worth the wait. He knew where I lived. His mother, who worked in a public school cafeteria, finally arrived home. And to both kids' surprise, the bully recognized DiSpirito's mother. She had been slipping the boy food on their shared bus rides, not realizing who he was. DiSpirito continued, saying that after seeing the woman who generously shared her cheese and salami, Jimmy "was immediately defused, looked to me and said 'It's cool,' gave her a hug and walked home.
And every day after that we were friends. The partners and businessmen at the time were a little less focused on the bottom line and a little more focused on creating wonderful experiences, which gave people like me an opportunity to try anything and everything and really be super experimental to a point where you were bound to find 20 hits because you were able to try a thousand things.
I'd like to see us go back to that direction, but we're moving away from it. I think the high rents and the high labor cost are just making it that we'll do the same menu everywhere to make it easier. If a restaurant doesn't break even or make profit first quarter, first month, first week, even, you're in trouble. Well, it felt, going in, like there was going to be tension.
There was a hero and an anti-hero. But no one expected what came out. None of us were ready for the show as it was finally produced. I think they did a really good job of making compelling television. It got great ratings and was the surprise hit of the summer. But obviously in order to do that they had to create lots of tension, and they most certainly did.
Around that same time, you and your partners sold Union Pacific. I have a confession: I never ate there. After you sold Union Pacific, were you trying to get away from restaurants altogether? When I left Union Pacific and Rocco's, I expected to be in a new restaurant in six months, 12 months, 18 months, 36 months.
I didn't ever make a decision to not be in restaurants. I worked on a bunch of potential places that never panned out. I'd been speaking to restaurateurs, people who run big and small companies, about opening restaurants pretty much the whole time. But at some point, I felt like what I did at Union Pacific at that time and place had kind of escaped us and there was no point in me coming back to do that again.
Then I discovered the joy of writing books, and once I got into doing triathlons and other things, it dawned on me that there was no way to work a restaurant into my life at the moment. I was living a very typical New York City chef's life. I ate a lot of fois gras. I got mercury poisoning from all of the raw fish consumed.
We were totally indulging all night on the line and then, at the end of the night, I'd sit down and taste 10 dishes and send my notes to the sous chefs. We had a great wine list and a great sommelier. Just lots of eating and drinking. Did it just occur to you that you were unhealthy or was there a come-to-Jesus moment?
Oh, the latter. My doctor, Dr. Hammer, a man whom I greatly respect, brought the hammer down, so to speak. He said, "You know, I always tell you your health is nothing to worry about.
Well, that's changed. And I was like, "So what you're saying is that I can either take this medicine or I can eat better, work out, and not be impotent. So I started Atkins, got a trainer, and then I found out about triathlons, and a year later I was in the best shape of my life.
This is serious business! In the end, Dispirito found comfort by writing his own cookbooks and making cameos on some of the many Food Network reality competitions. Still, he admits he struggles with anxiety. I am basically mostly still that guy, 20 years of therapy later.
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