EAT AND DRINK THOUGHTFULLY
IT WOULD BE a serious omission to talk to chefs about eating, and leave out drinking. Going out after the restaurant closes is an ingrained part of chef social life. “Alcohol is a big problem. Our business means at midnight we are talking, drinking, eating—and sometimes singing,” says Masaharu Morimoto, a karaoke fan. I recall a memorable night at a New York charity event at the Harvard Club where Morimoto took the stage for a sing-off with Ming Tsai, who was clearly at a disadvantage, as the lyrics were in Japanese (and he was a Yalie at the Harvard Club). Still, a good time was had by all.
But that was rare, a party specifically organized for after midnight. Most nights the eating and drinking late is just a response to being let out from a job when the rest of the world is winding down. “I used to hate when I got off of work at one a.m. as a line cook: ‘What do we do now?’” recalls Marc Murphy of his early years in the business. Most chefs who have ever struggled with unwanted pounds admit that they took on some of that extra weight in liquid form. “The biggest problem in the industry is that our downtime is midnight to four a.m.,” says Murphy, “and nothing good goes on after midnight.”
Lesson 62: Smart chefs don’t drink like they used to
I begrudge no one his youth, but I wasn’t particularly interested in hearing from chefs in their twenties who can go wild at night and wake up not only feeling fine, but knowing that all they have to do to avoid putting on weight is to keep up the usual set of unconscious metabolic processes. Get to a certain point, and something’s got to give. Here’s the math, courtesy of Tom Colicchio: “There are roughly two hundred calories in a cocktail. If you have five, that’s a thousand—nearly half your calories for the whole day, which you’ve already eaten.”
It may be an obvious point, but to weigh less, you may have to drink less. Morimoto proved that theory when he stepped on the scale a few years back and saw it nearing a hundred kilos (about 220 pounds). I don’t want to be a hundred kilos! he thought, and immediately took action. He dialed back both the postwork drinking and the late-night bowls of ramen or Korean barbecue, and ramped up his workouts, lost forty pounds in three months, and, he says, felt much better.
Here’s how you know that a lot of partying is a young chef’s game, and when to get out of it: When Morimoto considered the reasons to lose weight and get healthier, he didn’t think only of himself. “This restaurant has two hundred employees. It is called Morimoto. If I am doing something bad for my health, it is not going to be great business here. So I decided to move on,” he told me. He still has a drink from time to time. “I still love karaoke and barbecue, but I am so busy that it’s a struggle to find the time,” says Morimoto. “That might be a good thing, though, as whenever I karaoke, I drink alcohol, because drinking is part of karaoke culture. So to stay healthy, it’s good to keep yourself busy!” Happily for anyone who stumbles into the right karaoke bar at the right time, he hasn’t given up singing either.
Some chefs have stopped consuming alcohol entirely, for reasons that go beyond the scale. “I got that out of my system when I was younger,” says Nate Appleman, who appears to miss it not at all. When Alex Stratta began a reboot of his eating, he dropped all alcohol, and “that made a huge difference,” he says. “It’s a lifestyle consideration. I liked to indulge in everything, so I just abstain. If I have a glass of wine, I don’t feel good. I love wine, but I’ve had my share.”
Same with Gregory Gourdet. “As a personal choice, I don’t drink at all,” says Gourdet, though he’s not advocating for everyone to do the same. “I have a lot of respect for wine. Wine has tons of antioxidants and health benefits, and it definitely enhances a dining experience. But I stopped, and that’s helped me save on calories. I used to really enjoy small-brewery beers, but those pack a lot of calories as well, so it’s something you need to factor into your meal if you’re really watching calories and health. Fruity cocktails, which can be fun in the summer months, are way too high in sugar. As fun as they taste, it’s good to be cautious with those. But, obviously, nothing in moderation is going to kill you.”
Plenty of chefs who still enjoy a drink know this, and have curbed their behavior. Leave the multiple mixed drinks and fruity cocktails to the young. Easier said than done for some. There are few things that feel more hospitable than a specialty cocktail offered when you enter a party; I have trouble saying no to one. But I have no trouble saying no to two.
Lesson 63: They drink water
In grade school back in Dayton, Ohio, Ming Tsai played tennis and dreamed of going to Wimbledon. Despite being so active, he claims that as a preteen he was “a little chubby.” So the ten-year-old Ming came up with his own regimen to get lean. “It basically consisted of doing one hundred sit-ups every day, and drinking six glasses of water before every meal.”
The sit-ups-and-water routine lasted about a year, and had less of an effect than did shooting up six inches as an adolescent. But Ming has retained one element from his younger self’s well-intentioned plan: drinking water before drinking anything else. “If I go to New York or I’m out partying with all my chef friends, I will drink a full glass of water with every alcoholic beverage I drink,” says Tsai. “One for one, that’s my secret.” If you can’t drink any more water, you’re probably done with the hard stuff too.
In addition to slowing down one’s alcohol consumption, water is the perfect beverage to replace soft drinks, which typically fail the real-food test—they are full of corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. Giving those up was crucial to Art Smith’s new way of eating and living. “I can’t tell you the evils of diet soda,” he says over lunch. “Honey, I quit drinking diet soda, and now I drink a lot of water. In eight months I have not had a diet soda in my mouth. I have not had Splenda in my mouth. I have not had NutraSweet in my mouth. I don’t even have stevia [an herbal sugar substitute] in my mouth. I have none of that, because it creates bingeing; it makes you hungry. If there was one key to my weight loss, it was learning to look at something as beautiful as a glass of water as not only a source of refreshment, but a source of health.”
Lesson 64: They try not to let alcohol pick the menu
Going out after work usually means eating as well as drinking. “It’s a lifestyle thing,” says Naomi Pomeroy. “You don’t have time to eat when you work late hours, so you’re starving at midnight, which is a bad time to start eating. If you have one or two cocktails, not only is that extra calories, but it is bad decision-making time.”
When she launched her restaurant, dinner was sometimes just bread with butter or olive oil. “That plus a few glasses of wine? Doesn’t look good in a bathing suit,” she says with a laugh. Up about thirty pounds from the weight at which she is comfortable, Pomeroy decided to make some changes. “Honestly, my thirty pounds was from drinking, not from what I eat at work.”
Sometimes the drinking starts earlier. Says New York chef Simpson Wong, “On a busy night, friends come in; they want you to sit with them; they want to buy you a glass of wine. Other friends stop in, another glass of wine.” His nights out are fewer, but he remembers going to Koreatown or Chinatown or someplace open late, like Balthazar, a round-the-clock bistro in SoHo. “After a few glasses, your judgment is all mixed up. I used to pick up a burger and fries, then go to sleep.”
This is the corollary to eating with your eyes open: Don’t let your vision get blurred. But it happens. After the very occasional night of excess, Wong, who typically doesn’t each much breakfast, will make himself a hydrating soup. “Your body craves fluids,” he says. “If I’ve gone out, the next day I take a jar of tom yum paste, a pot of water, fish sauce, glass noodles, and green vegetables. The soup makes me sweat, because it’s spicy and sour and hot. I sit in front of the TV, watch CNN International, and sweat it out.”
Lesson 65: They don’t let the drinking start long before the dining does
There is a movie line that my husband likes to quote when things don’t go exactly as planned. It comes from a touching domestic moment (involving a projectile frosted cake aimed at someone’s head) in the 1986 action flick Raw Deal. So put on your best Ah-nold Schwarzenegger voice and say it with me: “You should not drink . . . und bake.”
Am I the only person who pops open the wine bottle while I’m cooking? Surely not. Sometimes the recipe you are preparing at that very moment calls for wine or beer, and as long as it’s open, right? But this all but ensures that you will sit down to a meal and pour yourself yet another glass (or two), having already downed one (or two).
Of course, if you’re cooking alongside a friend, it just feels impolite not to offer, and then to let them drink alone. Ted and Matt Lee almost always cook together when they are testing recipes, inviting family and neighbors to enjoy and critique the results. For a while, they were also writing a wine column for a magazine. “People would send us wine,” recalls Ted. “There was always some around, and you do have a mandate to taste wine, so why not have a taste at four p.m.? By the end of the evening, that’s a bottle, and alcohol is a lot of calories and sugar.”
So starting to drink before you’ve even gotten the food to the table isn’t the way to go if you want to keep track of your intake. It’s just extra calories that won’t add to your enjoyment when you finally do sit down. Though Matt Lee has always been naturally slender, now that he is past forty he notices when what he consumes has an effect on him. “It’s not the fats or the volume of food, but the carbohydrates in liquid sources that are the main threat,” he says. “I’ve gotten rid of the four p.m. beer.”
Lesson 66: Some smart chefs still enjoy wine with food
Consumed immoderately, wine “is a huge calorie builder,” says Mark McEwan. “Four glasses of wine before you go to bed will give you a belly real quick.” Yet as conscious as he is about how he eats and drinks, he still feels that, particularly over a meal with friends, “it’s very engaging to kill a bottle of wine.” Nearly across the board among chefs, wine is described as part of the pleasure of a good meal.
Throughout his weight loss, wine remained part of Joe Bastianich’s job—he owns wineries in Italy—and his life. That is something he has no intention of reforming. He still drinks wine nearly every day, a glass or two either at lunch or dinner. I assumed that this was an occupational hazard. But he quickly disabuses me of that notion.
“My job is to taste wine and know wine and be a buyer of wine. My job is not to drink wine,” he says. “I drink wine because I like it.” How much he consumes is “moderated by what I have to get up and do the next morning.” That’s a big switch from the early days of his partnership with Mario Batali. “We’d get a côte for two at Balthazar with three bottles of wine. It was celebratory eating after working hard. Do that for a couple of months and the weight jumps on you.”
He’s cut back, for sure, but sees no reason to give up wine entirely. “A glass of wine has 140 calories—even if you drink two, all you have to do is not eat a Snickers bar and you’re at the same place.” (Here’s the math: A regular Snickers bar is two hundred and eighty calories, same as two six-ounce glasses of wine.) But, unlike candy bars, wine has an expansive effect on eating and drinking—it tends to make people do more of both. “And that’s kind of life,” he says. “That’s the beauty of life: eating a good meal, having a couple of bottles of wine with friends, and laughing and being happy.”
Wong describes this as a “kitchen sink” recipe—just throw in whatever you have. From experience, I know it can take leftover roasted chicken, kale, garlic, chives, scallions, and rice. The broth is delicious, and well worth preparing for breakfast—with or without a hangover—or any other time of day, if you’re not into greens and fish sauce first thing when you wake up. But try them, try them and you will see. . . .
Makes one generous serving; you can throw in fewer ingredients, but keep the two cups of broth for a big, steamy bowl.
2 cups water or chicken broth
1 teaspoon store-bought tom yum paste (a widely stocked Thai spice paste, usually containing chili, garlic, lemongrass, shrimp paste, and galangal, a relative of ginger)
½ teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon fish sauce
½ teaspoon lime juice
½ cup chicken breast (sliced thin)
5 shrimp (peeled and deveined)
½ cup vegetables
1 cup rice noodles (presoaked in cold water for ½ hour), or ½ cup of cooked rice
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro or scallions
Salt and pepper to taste
1. Bring water to a boil; add tom yum paste, sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice.
2. Add chicken and cook for 1 minute, making sure chicken is cooked through.
3. Add shrimp, vegetables, and noodles. Cook for another minute. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour the noodle soup into a bowl; top with cilantro and serve.
Adapted from Simpson Wong.
Mark McEwan’s Steak with Horseradish Dressing
Horseradish and beef are a classic pairing, but McEwan’s take isn’t the traditional dairy-based creamy sauce. His sharp vinaigrette is terrific on the steak we tried it with, but would go great with fish or chicken, on sandwiches or potatoes. The recipe makes more than you’ll need for four six- to eight-ounce steaks, so you’ll have some left over for experimenting. Mark recommends pairing with a Chardonnay or Pinot Noir.
serves 4
⅓ cup white wine vinegar
3 tablespoons freshly grated horseradish
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
6 parsley sprigs, roughly chopped
1 sprig fresh thyme, chopped
⅔ cup olive oil
Salt and pepper
4 6- to 8-ounce boneless, center-cut New York strip steaks, grass-fed preferred
1. Whisk together the vinegar, horseradish, Dijon, parsley, and thyme.
2. Whisking continuously, slowly add the olive oil in a thin stream. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
3. Preheat a grill over high heat.
4. Generously season the steaks with olive oil, salt, and pepper.
5. Cook over high heat for 3 to 4 minutes on each side for medium-rare doneness, longer depending on personal preference.
6. Let the steaks rest on a warmed serving platter, loosely covered with foil, for 10 minutes before serving with the horseradish sauce.
Adapted from Mark McEwan.
Matt and Ted Lee’s Shrimp Burgers
The Lees have surveyed shrimp burgers throughout the South’s many shrimping towns, and developed their own take with lemon and ginger. A slightly oaky white wine pairs well. They also like a hoppy American ale with them.
serves 4
2 quarts water
1 tablespoon shrimp or crab boil, like Old Bay
1 pound headless large shrimp (26 to 30 per pound), shells on
2 tablespoons chopped scallions
¼ cup fresh corn kernels, cut from the cob, about half an ear (or frozen, if it’s winter)
2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1½ teaspoons lemon zest (from 1 lemon)
3 tablespoons high-quality store-bought mayonnaise, such as Duke’s or Hellmann’s
1 cup bread crumbs, preferably fresh (from about 2 slices bread)
Kosher salt to taste
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 egg, beaten
1½ tablespoons canola oil
4 hamburger buns (optional)
Lettuce leaves
Tomato slices
1. In a 3-quart saucepan, bring the water and shrimp boil to a boil over high heat. Turn off the heat, add the shrimp, and let stand until they are just pink, about 2 minutes.
2. Drain and run under cold water to stop the cooking. Peel and devein the shrimp. You should have 1¾ cups chopped shrimp.
3. In a large bowl, mix the shrimp with the scallions, corn, parsley, ginger, and lemon zest. Stir in the mayonnaise and bread crumbs and season with salt and black pepper. Add the egg and gently fold with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until evenly distributed.
4. Form the shrimp mixture into 4 patties, each 3 inches in diameter. Wrap the patties in plastic wrap and let stand in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
5. Remove the burgers from the refrigerator and unwrap. Place the oil in a 12-inch skillet and heat over high heat. When it shimmers, add the burgers and sauté until gently browned, about 3 minutes per side. Drain on a dinner plate lined with paper towels.
6. Serve on toasted hamburger buns with lettuce, tomatoes.
Adapted from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners by Matt Lee and Ted Lee. W. W. Norton and Co., 2006.