EAT TO FUEL YOUR BODY
“YEAH, I EXERCISE,” Nancy Silverton tells me, with an implied shrug over the phone. “But I’m no Joe Bastianich.”
Bastianich has got to love that in the last few years he has become a benchmark by which others (or at least Silverton, one of his partners in two Los Angeles restaurants) can measure their physical activity. Bastianich’s makeover from a soft-in-the-middle wine-and-food guy to a lean marathon runner is nothing short of modern legend in the food world; everybody asked whether I’d be talking to him about it.
I long debated whether to ask food folk about exercise. Phys ed is not their area of expertise, so consulting them about it didn’t have the same logic as tapping their food knowledge. At the same time, if we are to talk about how chefs control their weight, it feels disingenuous to imply that they do it through dietary measures alone.
Once I began inquiring about their fitness regimes, I noticed a few things: First, many chefs approach their workouts with the same intensity and need for mastery that they bring to their work in the kitchen; some have even competed in their sports. This group has tailored how they eat to suit the demands of their activity.
A second group takes the opposite approach: They are tolerant of exercise and work out mainly to offset what they want and need to eat. By their own estimations, chefs will sometimes eat more than four thousand calories a day in the line of duty. Fortunately, because most normal people don’t eat that much in a day, we need not aspire to be superathletes to compensate.
I’ve included stories of chefs who train intensively both because these testimonials inspire me (“if Art Smith can run twenty-six miles, surely I can run five. . . .”), and because they illustrate the physical exertion required to eat without boundaries. Far more accessible, and equally inspiring, is the example of chefs who work out by doing something they love to do, whether it’s boxing, yoga, dancing, or running.
Some claim to avoid exercise. Matt Lee is one such infuriating soul. “I don’t exercise at all,” he reports, not so much a brag as a fact. “My activity is seasonal, gardening and home improvement stuff in the spring and summer.”
Ted Lee, however, is an enthusiastic convert to working out. After a particularly well-fed summer in France, where his wife was an artist in residence at the Monet foundation, Ted decided to join a gym with her. “I love it. I realized I need to get my heart rate up. I feel like just as you balance your food, you need to balance your activities.”
Lesson 67: Smart chefs run (and eat to run)
As a teen, says Joe Bastianich, “I was not what you would call ‘athletic.’” In order to drop the sixty extra pounds he was carrying by his late thirties, he knew exercise had to be part of the equation. He started walking—the first day “was hell,” he says. But he stuck with it and worked up to running, first a mile, then a 5K, then a 10K. The first time he finished the New York City Marathon was “a life-changing day.” Running, even shorter distances, he feels “is magic. If you’re lucky enough to be able to run, it will cure you of everything that’s wrong in your life. It is that powerful.”
While he is a model of what running can do (cure everything that’s wrong? maybe not), Bastianich allows that getting to this level of fitness wasn’t easy. “You have to deal with six months of pain,” he says. In his experience, the endorphins—that famed runner’s high—don’t kick in until the fourth or fifth mile of a run, and many frustrated would-be runners give up before they can comfortably cover that distance. “They experience only the pain, and never get the pleasure of running.” No one doubts Bastianich the wine expert when he talks about the pleasures of a glass of Friulano. He wishes they would trust him on the running thing too. “It really becomes a joy,” he says. “Running the New York City Marathon is like being a seven-year-old on Christmas day.”
At his level of training, he can basically eat anything—pasta, cheese, wine—without putting weight back on, and still enjoys a great meal with friends. But now he also thinks about which foods will power his workouts, and which will slog him down. “You have to eat commensurate with how you’re asking your body to perform—you’re looking at food as fuel. Before, food was a reward for a job well-done, or a way to entertain myself. Now I find other ways.”
Just before his son Oliver’s birth in 2007, Nate Appleman’s weight reached “the pinnacle,” 250 on the scale. (He’s five-foot-seven.) “I gained baby weight as well. I was really big.” He saw himself in a dire situation, but believed he could run the weight off; he didn’t alter his diet at all—those changes came later. “I didn’t know the first thing about working out or taking care of yourself. So I just ran. When I say ‘ran’ I mean I would run a block, then walk a block, then maybe the next week I’d run two blocks. The first time I ran a mile without stopping it was a huge accomplishment,” says Appleman. Though he has since run marathons in less than four hours, he hasn’t forgotten the feeling of those triumphant first blocks—and the pain and exhaustion that followed. “I had really bad shin splints, to the point where I wore braces and shin splint guards. I would come home and—this is before I got rid of my TV—I would fall asleep watching TV. When I would get up to go to bed, I could barely walk. That lasted a year.” (News flash: Just as restaurant chefs don’t eat the way they cook in restaurants, TV chefs don’t necessarily watch a lot of TV. In my estimation, no one has ever become less active by getting rid of the box.)
Another chef who rethought his eating habits as he upped the intensity of his athletic challenges is Gregory Gourdet. A move to the West Coast from New York provided an opportunity for a clean slate. Although he hadn’t exercised with any regularity since high school, “I started running. I was trying to figure what burned the most calories the fastest, and running was the easiest thing to do. I would get up and go a couple miles here and there. Then I got involved with people who ran more than I did, and I set goals for distances until I did my first half marathon. Then six months of training for my first marathon. Then ultramarathon: thirty-one miles, which was a six-hour run.”
Soon he adapted his diet to support his training. He gets protein from eggs, fish, or chicken, eats loads of vegetables and fruits, and cut out dairy, red meat, most grains and beans, and alcohol. “I found I’m a lot faster when I’m on the lighter side,” says Gourdet. “I was 185 to 220 pounds for most of my chef career, and now, training for my first triathlon, I stay 160 to 165. It makes a huge difference. But when the winter hits and it’s cold outside, I’ll gain ten pounds.”
At his heaviest Art Smith hadn’t wanted to walk around the block. By training with determination, he finished the Chicago marathon. When he married his boyfriend of ten years in 2010, the wedding began with the guests and the grooms running four miles through Washington, D.C. (Don’t worry: They showered and changed before the party.) Yes, it was a little bit of a stunt, and it got some press, but it meant more people learned about Smith and his example of getting healthy. “I think when it comes to weight loss, regardless of whether you’re a chef or not, you’re just looking for some kind of inspiration. Losing weight takes more than willpower. It takes a great sense of support around you.”
For Marcus Samuelsson, the motivation to run in Central Park comes from a different place. “I never thought about it from a ‘working out’ point of view; I think of it from a sanity point of view,” he says. “I never think, ‘I need to run six miles today because I’ve gained weight.’” Instead, he says, he is driven to carve out the time to clear his head, to think without distractions. “I need to be by myself. By mile two or three, I’m thinking: ‘I wonder if the suckling pig should be done with jerk? Jerk is relevant for what we do at the Rooster, and I don’t want to do suckling pig like everybody else does suckling pig. Should we serve that with pickled peaches—peaches have come in season. Yeah, let’s do that. And mustard seed. Oh, no, we have mustard seed in something else. Take it out.’ By mile five, ‘Maybe we should do a fish?’ And I think about my staff. ‘Can this person take the step from line cook to sous chef?’ I think about the sacrifices she’s made, and what we’ve done to teach her. Running gives me a space to think about all that.”
Simpson Wong, who jogs along the Hudson River, also subscribes to the idea of a moving meditation. “Running clears your mind,” he says. “You have to empty the garbage can; then new ideas can come in. I love that.”
Lesson 68: They work out to work off what they eat
“I came to a realization a long time ago that I’m never going to change the way I eat,” says Michael Symon. “I cannot walk by the bread station and not eat a piece of bread. It’s essentially impossible for me. So I work out five to seven days a week. It’s the only way to counteract the calories.” Symon, among those in the exercise-to-consume camp, was a wrestler in high school until he broke his arm. These days he meets up with a longtime friend in the gym. “We’ll lift four days a week and do cardio two or three days. If I want to be in shape, that’s how I have to live.”
It’s cyclical, of course: The more you eat, the more you need to work out, and the more you work out, the more you may feel you need to eat. This can totally undo your efforts if you reward yourself too often. But it can also change your relationship with food for the better. I don’t aspire to be a long-distance runner, though my mother ran the Los Angeles Marathon when she was fifty-two, so never say never. The most I can handle so far is a 10K. Running, even at that length, stokes the appetite in a way that makes me hungry but not inclined to overeat. Dining after a good run has an element of reward for a job well-done, but also a built-in constraint: I don’t want to sabotage my attempts at getting in shape. After an early fall race in Central Park I was hungry, sure, but I felt great and wanted to eat something as healthy as it was delicious. Breakfast was two poached eggs over fava beans at Morandi, the café in my neighborhood where I go for great Italian brunches and sightings of a breed of actors more often seen at the Sundance Film Festival. Were any there that day? Who knows. I was deep into my eggs.
Lesson 69: They play like they’re still kids
A chef’s hero is not necessarily another chef. As a boy in 1970s Hong Kong, Susur Lee idolized Bruce Lee, and asked his mom for kung fu lessons. “I used to go up the hill to school in the morning and see people doing martial arts, ladies and men, in the Communist outfit of blue pants, white shirts, and the braid with the ribbon. Even the women looked very masculine, but they would kick ass!” He soon got lessons and says, “I loved practicing. I was a very physical kid.” His teacher also gave instruction in philosophy and calligraphy, which the students practiced on toilet paper “scrolls.” “He told me, ‘If you want to see farther, you have to climb more steps,’” recalls Lee. “I still have that scroll in my first restaurant.”
Susur started dressing like Bruce Lee, wearing tracksuits everywhere; he was fifteen when the star died. “He was one of a kind, a master and a philosopher. Hardworking, so inspirational.” That Bruce Lee excelled at many forms of martial arts, from kung fu to ju kwan do to aikido, impressed the teenage Susur. “I saw how if you mix things together, you make it yours, one of a kind. I thought of this when I started cooking; I wanted to know everything: chef, baker, wok chef—and be good at everything. Cooking reminded me of martial arts; it gave me the joy of being physical.” So while he’s no longer attending kung fu classes, those early days laid a foundation for a fit life. He plays tennis, runs, and more recently took up yoga and saw that “the warm-up is very similar to martial arts.”
I think Susur offers a good example of getting in touch with the active children many of us—including the more sedentary among us—once were. Going to the gym can feel like a chore. But finding a sport or activity that harkens back to childhood can make physical activity a pleasure.
In addition to running, Marcus Samuelsson has played soccer since he was a boy. In his early forties, he says his game is still pretty good—he holds his own against twenty-one-year-olds. For him, soccer isn’t just running around on a field; it is a weekly piece of home. He plays in a regular game in lower Manhattan with a group of Swedish ex-pats, none of whom are ethnic Swedes. “There’s Iranian Swedes, Turkish Swedes, Jewish Swedes, Latin-American Swedes,” explains Samuelsson. “We call ourselves ‘Blatte United,’ which refers to what we were called when we were kids—it was very negative. We’ve sort of converted it to celebrate that word, but we are also patriotic; we are all Swedish and living in America. We play against Brits, Germans, Brazilians, French. It’s the biggest game in the world, but it is sort of underground in New York City.”
This high-energy game is not the time to zone out and meditate on personnel issues or menu changes. “You can’t when you’ve got someone running at you.” But that change of venue is as essential as his time alone on the running track. “It’s great, and it’s a social experience with no cooking involved, which is important.”
Sang Yoon has played hockey with intensity since childhood, through his years at Boston University. He still gets on the ice regularly in an adult league. The morning that we meet, he has just come from the dentist. “I took a puck to the mouth,” he tells me. “See the scar? I knocked a tooth out.” In the past, he says, “I’ve torn my ACL, torn my rotator cuff, torn a groin muscle, an abdominal muscle, and a ligament in my ankle, all in the last three years.” During his rehab from one injury, he took up Pilates. Then he was back on the ice. “Hockey is something I want to do on an ongoing basis. I refuse to take up golf, or a safer activity. My parents ask, ‘Why do you still do this?’ Why? Because it’s exciting! I like to skate more than I like to walk.”
Lesson 70: They tap into a passion
As a teen Tom Colicchio was a jock of all trades: “Football, basketball, baseball, and I was a competitive swimmer from ages ten to seventeen.” He also had always loved boxing—watching it, that is. “My parents were both fight fans,” says the New Jersey native. A few years ago he was enjoying a bout at Madison Square Garden when he got a tap on the shoulder from a man who recognized him. “He said he was a trainer, and told me to give him a call if I ever wanted to work out. I did, and now I’m totally addicted to it.”
No kidding. The first time I met Tom was at a magazine photo shoot with the Top Chef gang posing around a Thanksgiving table. While food stylists fake-cooked a turkey, and hair and clothing stylists whirred around his costars, Padma Lakshmi and Gail Simmons, Tom stood waiting, bemoaning his unnecessarily early call time. “I could be boxing right now.” He sighed. “It’s not like I need my hair done.” At his peak he was in the ring three times a week—shadowboxing, working the bag, sparring, and going up to six rounds against his trainer. Wait, someone is getting paid to hit Tom Colicchio? In the face? (Does Bravo exec Andy Cohen know about this?)
“Oh, sure,” Colicchio says. “You have headgear on, and my trainer is not trying to knock me out, just score points. But you get hit; it’s the game.” Absorbing punches aside, what appeals to him and other devotees about an activity like boxing (over, say, the treadmill) is that it engages not only the body but the mind. “It’s like a chess match.”
Music brings passion and purpose to Art Smith’s workouts. On a trip to New York, when he had first started losing weight, a friend suggested he stop in at a particular Chelsea gym known for its body-obsessed gay clientele. Smith thought the idea preposterous—he was far too self-conscious to walk through the door there. Yet somehow he ended up in that gym, bringing his then pretty large self onto the floor alongside what seemed to him to be a roomful of hard bodies. He focused on the disco sound track drowning out any perceived slights against him. “Honey, I love to dance,” he tells me. “When I heard that music I got on that elliptical and I. Went. Crazy. I loved it.” Back at home in Chicago, he joined a branch of the same gym.
Music can make you do funny things. It can make otherwise sensible people in black-tie wedding finery do the Macarena. Smith found it was the same with exercise. Filling an iPod with the music he loved—and that means a lotta Lady Gaga—got him to move. “I think I lost eighty-five pounds from ‘Bad Romance,’” he tells me. “I have my iPod on, and I play it loud, and I’m going to town. You find that happy place, and you go for it.”
Simpson Wong got a musical infusion when he was visiting India. “It was holy season, and at the resort they gave everyone a white outfit and they had a celebration with different-colored powder that you throw at each other, and you dance to live Bollywood songs.” Exhilarated by the experience, he sought out a studio that teaches Bollywood classes here in New York. “Dancing is great exercise. You move every part of your body. I like it a lot.” That’s really the key, isn’t it? Find what you like a lot.
Lesson 71: They get on their bikes
For a certain type of person, it isn’t enough to feed a passion at the amateur level; they want to compete with the pros. Under those conditions, a workout isn’t about burning off last night’s lasagna; it’s about a person becoming the best he can be at his sport. Two chefs surprised me with their more-than-a-hobby approach to fitness.
While reaching the critical top of the Chicago food scene, Laurent Gras was simultaneously riding up to four hundred miles a week on his racing bike. Then Gras moved to New York with plans both to open a restaurant and to enter ranked competition. “I’ll get a license from the U.S. cycling federation, join a club in New York, train with the team, and compete in the spring. That’s the goal,” he told me, adding, “besides looking for work.” (That proved no problem; he became a popular guest chef and object of obsession for foodies who track temporary “pop-up” dining experiences.)
While this amount of exercise—he rides for five hours at a stretch—will incinerate anything Gras cares to eat, he is actually pretty mindful about eating exactly what his body requires. If he eats too much, he might carry extra weight; not enough and he will literally run out of fuel on a long ride. “You can blow out on the bike because you have no more power. I eat gels or bars on the bike.” I find this just short of shocking, to think of this French chef eating unit doses of food-energy product. But this illustrates the difference between eating for pleasure and eating for exercise. When he’s training, he says, he needs six to seven thousand calories a day (burning seven or eight hundred calories an hour). “You really do need a lot of food. I will eat a pound of pasta.”
In the off-season he trains and eats like, I hesitate to say, a more or less regular person. “When I go to the gym and just exercise, I don’t need to eat so much.” As a result of his careful calibration, during training Gras keeps his body fat at about two percent—a distinction that earned him a place in the Men’s Fitness 2010 lineup of the world’s twenty-five fittest guys. (Irony alert: Gras is French for fat.)
On the other side of the country, Quinn Hatfield is equally bicycle-obsessed, but in a slightly different way. He competes in velodrome races that are over in seventy seconds or less. “I’m not a moderate guy,” he reminds me. “I try to train as hard as I work.” He’s in Hatfield’s kitchen from five to eleven p.m. six nights a week, yet finds time to train between ten and twelve hours a week. “I have a coach who gives me my program, and I plan my week around it. I have backup safety plans. If I miss a ride, I can do it at home on the trainer after work.” Yes, after leaving the restaurant at eleven p.m., he’ll do a ninety-minute ride on a stationary bike. Some nights, he says, he’ll think about missing a workout. “Like last night, I sat on the couch, fell asleep, then woke up and thought, ‘I’m going to skip it.’ But I got on the bike.”
His dedication has paid off. “I do really well on the masters’ level, which is riders over thirty years old, and I was state champion in California in all three of my events in 2010. I went to masters’ nationals, and got a third place and a fifth place.”
As he’s reeling off his accomplishments—and I should say he wasn’t bragging, just making sure I understood this wasn’t some random thing he was doing in his practically nonexistent free time—his wife, Karen, is nodding along. She’s more like most people I know: well-intentioned about exercise, but prey to the clock. “Something happens—you move or you open another restaurant, and it’s difficult to maintain regular exercise,” she says. Or, as happened to her just weeks after we met, you have another baby. But Quinn adds that Karen is actually good at fitting it all in somehow. “Before this pregnancy, she’d go to the gym and do an hour on the treadmill,” he says. “Which seems crazy to me.”
Lesson 72: They enlist an ally
Nancy Silverton is not a believer in hard-core workouts. “I play tennis—poorly—once a week,” she says in a way that makes me believe her game isn’t that poor. But she does start each day with an hour of exercise, usually under the watch of a trainer. “I train outside, because I don’t like the gym. So we walk in the neighborhood with weights. I do push-ups against somebody’s wall, and tie weight-resistant bands against somebody’s fence. That’s as much exercise as I can tolerate, but it’s an important part of my day. I feel I’ve done a little bit of something.”
If having a trainer once in a while is accessible to you, it can be a great motivator. Sue Torres uses hers a little differently from Silverton—she wants to keep the intensity of her workouts high, and knows she won’t do it alone. So she has a standing date with a personal trainer for weights, kickboxing, and boxing. “I’ve given him permission to hit me with a stick when I mess up,” she says, and even though she laughs when she says it, after a moment I realize she’s serious.
She explains further: “That’s what I understand—old-school. If I don’t do a push-up right, he says, ‘Do it again.’ He won’t hurt me, but he keeps me in line.” You may not want such tough love. Her coach’s method speaks to Torres, who, as a kid, toughed it out as the only girl on a boys’ baseball team, after nagging her mom to play. Having to keep up with the boys would later serve her well in male-dominated kitchens. It also fired up her athletic side. While she no longer plays team sports, that kind of physicality remains integral to her life. “It’s good to keep strong. I’m pretty fortunate in that I can eat whatever I want—and believe me, I eat an obscene amount of butter on bread. But I love it, and I work hard, so it’s okay. It hasn’t caught up with me yet.”
Mark McEwan keeps in line with help from his wife, who is as committed to working out and watching how they eat as he is. “We are very much on the same page, very regimented.” They each use the same trainer (separately) three days a week. “It’s boxing routines, jumping, weights—an hour of pure torture,” he says. “But without that I’d have to cut back what I eat even more.”
Note: Get the right trainer, which may mean trying out a few. The first one Art Smith reached out to, he recalls, “told me he was Miley Cyrus’s trainer. I was like, ‘Uh-uh, no. I’ve got more fat on my finger.’”
A good teacher at a gym class can be a motivator too (not to mention a way to avoid the expense of one-on-one support). “I can’t lose weight if I don’t exercise,” says Alex Guarnaschelli. “I spin. I take spinning classes until I can’t see.”
Lesson 73: They bend to stay strong
Professional cooking is itself a workout. I once heard a chef describe his job as “being paid to do aerobics in a sauna.” Several have found that incorporating yoga into their workouts is a fine antidote to the labor of a kitchen. “Standing up on your feet working for that many hours, that many years, you just want to feel good,” says Colorado chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson. Before he opened his own restaurant, Frasca Food and Wine, he was part of a heady, talented team of chefs that included Alinea’s Grant Achatz and Sou’Wester’s Eric Ziebold, working under Thomas Keller at the French Laundry. His physical memories of that time are still with him: “We worked an incredible amount, and would drink Jamba Juice, the biggest possible, because we were starving, dehydrated, and tired. But it was a beautiful time to work there. Thomas is one of the great mentors. It was crazy energy.”
These days Mackinnon-Patterson is the boss, and he isn’t running crazed through his day, sucking on a sugary juice. But many of the physical demands of the job remain. “Yoga has changed my ability to continue doing it. I was someone who would come home from work and roll around on the floor or rub up against the wall like a bear.” A visit from his friend Philadelphia chef Marc Vetri provided a better alternative. “He said yoga will change the way you feel, so I gave it a try. Oh, my God, I never felt that good.”
Now that yoga is the core of his routine, which also includes biking to work, he says, “My back doesn’t hurt. It became like getting dressed each day—I go all the time. I’m more calm and patient with my employees. Not because of any meditation, but you just take a breath and relax. It makes a difference. That and stretching the stiff joints and muscles have turned my life into a different kind of beauty.”
Yoga does have a way of seeping out of that hour-long class and into other aspects of your life. While I’ve certainly used a lengthy run as justification for a big bowl of pasta followed by gelato, I don’t think I’ve ever left a yoga studio with unhealthy cravings. Maybe I’m just highly suggestible, but I’m always in the mood for sweet potatoes, nutty brown rice, and green tea after yoga.
Rick Bayless is also a yoga devotee, though one who discovered his yoga-jock side only as an adult. “I came from a family of very athletic people who told me I was not athletic—and I believed them. From about second grade on, I never played a sport, because I was told I would not excel at it. Meanwhile, my brother was this star athlete,” says Bayless, whose older brother, Skip, became an ESPN sportscaster.
“But I discovered when I was about forty I had potential. I was feeling lethargic, heavy—I’d gained some weight,” recalls Bayless. “I just wanted to start moving, and I had a friend who was teaching yoga. She said, ‘You’d love it; come over.’ I did love the way it felt to move, to stretch. I started going to classes and there were all these postures I wanted to do, but I didn’t have the strength to do them. So being the kind of guy I am, I didn’t want to do yoga for ten more years to gain that strength. So I decided to go to a gym . . . but of course I was too embarrassed to go to a gym.” So Bayless invested in some home weights, to build strength. “I still do three days of yoga and three days of weight training and cardio. I’m in the best shape of my life.”
Like virtually everyone else who shared their fitness stories, Bayless found benefits that went beyond counteracting calories. “The workout is my antidote to the pressured lifestyle. When people say, ‘I’m too tired to go to the gym today; I think I’ll blow it off,’ I’m completely the opposite—I will be tired if I don’t get to the gym. If I don’t want to feel heavy and weighed down by the stresses of the day, I have to get to the gym; it’s what gives me energy and releases stress.”
Melissa Perello does yoga too, but the San Francisco chef says she can get a fine workout walking with her dog, Dingo. She is, like several of her colleagues, more of an exercise dabbler. When things get busy, she lets the workout slide a bit. But when she can, she says, “I try to ride my bike. I snowboard. I really like camping and hiking, just myself and my dog. I like being outside.”
Yoga is one part of Cat Cora’s weekly regimen, which might include cycling, climbing, hiking, swimming, or cardio and weights at the gym. Before becoming a chef, Cora earned a degree in exercise physiology. But she hasn’t always been fighting-lean. “I was chubby in high school and gained the freshman fifteen in college. I wasn’t eating right, and I wasn’t exercising at all,” she says. “If I stopped exercising and I ate anything I want, I could easily put weight on.” She includes yoga and meditation in her training, because “both the active, outward things and the more inward things help balance my life with my crazy career and raising kids.”
Ming Tsai has had a yoga practice for more than twenty years. A few times a week he takes a “hot yoga” class that, he says, “saves me. You sweat; you get all your toxins out. All chefs have toxins,” he reports with authority. “But it’s more than just physical; it really helps mentally too. You can’t be thinking about work when you’re on one foot with your other foot behind your head.”
Lesson 74: Eric Ripert hates exercise
If none of the above speaks to you, you might be a four-star French chef. “I don’t exercise at all. I hate exercising,” insists Eric Ripert. He’s six feet tall, and lean enough that Tom Colicchio wanted me to find out what his friend’s secret is.
Ripert never goes to a gym or runs or any of that. What he does do, however, is make his morning commute a worthy substitute. Every day he walks from his Upper East Side home, through Central Park, to work on the west side of Midtown. The route is only about two miles, and takes him roughly forty minutes, so this isn’t race-walking. But what’s important to note about Ripert’s routine is that when he says he does it every day, he doesn’t mean every day the weather permits, or every day that he isn’t in a big rush. He does it every day. “Even with a blizzard, or rain, or it’s a hundred and twenty degrees outside, I do it.”
Need proof? On a January morning when it was (I checked) ten degrees outside, and below zero with the wind chill factored in, Ripert was on his daily walk, posting online pictures of the icy road as he went. In his caption he’s transposed letters in “Bernardin,” so I imagine he was typing on his phone with gloves on. That’s dedication. This is what it is to have a daily routine. It means every day. Really every day. Or as another chef put it, “I eat every day, right?”
Art Smith’s Chicken and Dumplings
This recipe originates with Art’s mother, Addie Mae, whose dumplings are similar to flat, wide pappardelle noodles. Start with a good chicken and you will have broth that is fragrant and wonderful—if you can plan ahead a bit, cool the broth in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight; this will make it easier to skim the fat off the top. Use other fresh herbs like chives or tarragon or savory in addition to (or instead of) the parsley, if you like.
serves 6
One 3- to 3½-pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces
1 medium onion, quartered
2 celery ribs, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
2 quarts water
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
FOR THE DUMPLINGS:
1½ cups all-purpose flour
Salt
½ cup + 1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1. Place the chicken, onion, celery and carrots in a 5-quart Dutch oven or covered casserole and add the water, ½ teaspoon of salt, and ¼ teaspoon of pepper. Over high heat, bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cover tightly. Simmer, occasionally skimming off any foam that rises to the surface, until the chicken is tender, about 50 minutes.
2. Using tongs, transfer the chicken to a platter (keep the vegetables and broth simmering). When the chicken is cool enough to handle, remove the skin and cut the meat into bite-size pieces.
3. Meanwhile, increase the heat under the broth to high and cook until the liquid is reduced to about 6 cups. (If you’re in a hurry, strain the broth, and return 6 cups of broth and the vegetables to the pot, reserving the rest for another use.) Skim off the fat from the surface and stir the chicken meat into the pot. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
4. While the soup is cooking, make the dumplings: Place the flour, salt, and oil in a medium bowl and gradually stir in the water to make a stiff dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead briefly. Roll dough out to ¼ inch thick.
5. Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into strips that are about 1 inch by 2½ inches. Place on a plate in the freezer until ready to drop into the soup. Once the broth has reduced, slide the strips into the soup, without crowding them. Cover tightly and reduce heat to low. Simmer until the dumplings are cooked through and tender, about 10 minutes. Sprinkle with parsley, and serve the soup ladled into bowls.
Adapted from Back to the Table: The Reunion of Food and Family by Art Smith. Hyperion, 2001.
Joe Bastianich’s White Bean Stew with Swiss Chard and Tomatoes
Because he’s still a wine guy, I asked Joe what wine to pair with a vegetarian dish like this. His answer: a crisp Friulano.
serves 4 as a side dish
2 pounds Swiss chard, large stems discarded and leaves cut crosswise into 2-inch strips
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 cup canned tomatoes, chopped
16-ounce can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
Salt
1. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil. Add the chard and reduce the heat to medium and simmer until tender, about 8 minutes. Drain the greens and gently press out excess water.
2. In the same saucepan, warm the oil over medium heat. Add the garlic and crushed red pepper and cook until the garlic is golden, 1 minute. Add the tomatoes and bring to a boil. Add the beans and simmer for 3 minutes. Add the chard and simmer until the flavors meld, about 5 minutes. Season with salt to taste and serve.
Adapted from Joe Bastianich.
Rick Moonen’s Paper Route to the Kitchen
Rick Moonen remembers being a really active boy who loved handball and gymnastics in school. “That was fun. Me against the world, running, jumping. And I always had a bicycle.” The fourth of seven kids who lived with Mom, Dad, and Grandma in Flushing, Queens, Moonen describes a childhood that doesn’t really exist anymore in New York City: one where there were so many siblings that you were, he says, “pretty much on your own,” and an enterprising boy of ten could have a paper route that took him around the neighborhood and into the halls of strangers’ apartment buildings without peril.
Besides giving him pocket money, the paper route offered him an early food education. “People grew fruit in their yards, and I knew where every fruit tree was: pears, sour cherries. It was awesome. I’d climb the trees, eat the fruit.” He was responsible for delivering the afternoon papers to three apartment buildings in an enclave of mostly Italian, Greek, Jewish, Irish, and German families: “Take the elevator up to the top, and go down the stairs dropping off papers. On Friday night you had to go collect, and those hallways—the smells that would come out! Those dinners! I smelled fish cooking; it was really attractive to me. I’d never smelled lamb—my mother wasn’t allowed to cook it, because my father said it made him sick to his stomach.”
Moonen’s father was Dutch, his mother German-Irish. His dad had been, he says, “a spy for the government, taking pictures of what the Nazis were doing,” and Mom was a nurse. When she came home from work, she cooked—you had to with seven kids. “She was the one-pot wonder, with that big cast-iron pot. Sloppy joes or Swedish meatballs—I loved those. Pot roast. Ham. Friday we had fish, and she would broil the shit out of it,” he says with a laugh. Mom couldn’t have known that he would grow up to be a master of fish cookery (with some notable dishes barely touching a flame).
“But no lamb, because my father came over on a boat. It was rough. Everybody got sick, including the crew. When you get that sick, they give you mutton tea, which is mutton boiled to a consommé. Mutton is very fatty and has a distinctive lamb stink to it, and for the rest of your life you don’t want to smell that. So I never knew what lamb was, until I met the Greeks and discovered, ‘This is awesome!’
“My next-door neighbor was an Italian with a butcher shop. I got to watch bones being ripped apart; I was intrigued—the smell of meat, sawdust on the floor. I was getting an education, and I was so curious. I ended up in the kitchen with my mother, because I was so active, I’d take the TV apart with a screwdriver if she didn’t have me in the kitchen. I’d watch The Galloping Gourmet on TV. Graham Kerr—what a pisser. I loved it! Down the block from me was a couple named the Bontempis, who had a TV cooking show and lived in a gorgeous house. They would throw out the scripts and I’d pick them up from the garbage. They were in boxes,” he hastens to add. “It wasn’t like I was picking through banana peels.”
From these beginnings, a chef. Moonen garnered notice at the Water Club, and then after six years jumped to Oceana, where he earned three stars from the New York Times. “Boom! My life changes: You’re the fish guy,” he says. “Typecasting.” But he embraced the role and, still that enterprising kid inside, used it to voice concern about using seafood responsibly. It’s an issue that is much discussed now, but was barely on anyone’s radar at the time. In 1998 he signed on as a spokesman for the national “Give Swordfish a Break” campaign.
Eventually Moonen became a TV chef too. Full circle. But he says, “I don’t have a romance with myself. I watch a show once to make sure I didn’t look like a jerk.” He claims not to care how he looks, although he does want to stay fit. Exercise, he says, “makes me a better boss, a better businessman.” But the gymnastics he did as a teen, he says, had “screwed up my back nice. Then long hours in the kitchen didn’t help.” To his surprise, he found the best thing for him was Pilates, which he took up at the urging of a customer in Las Vegas, a Pilates instructor. “So now I do Pilates. And I still ride my bicycle. I put on my headphones and I’m in my own world.”