EAT AFTER EATING FOR TWO
“AS A CHEF, I did justice to my kind by gaining seventy-five pounds when I was pregnant,” says a reliably unabashed Alex Guarnaschelli. “I really enjoyed that. It was a unique metabolic experience.”
Oh, I know just what she means. With the exception of some heartburn at the five-month mark, my forty-one weeks of pregnancy were consistently among the best of my eating life. I did miss wine and raw fish. But I more than compensated with weekly post-prenatal yoga class visits to the City Bakery on Eighteenth Street for pretzel croissants and cups of hot cocoa. (The supersecret recipe, best I can tell, is heavy cream, dark chocolate, and a double chin.)
I wanted to know how mom-chefs eat, and I began by comparing notes with several about their pregnancies and how they ate and worked out during and after. Cat Cora kept up her ambitious routine, but modified the intensity. “I was still doing exercise every day, but I was walking or something low-impact. I don’t know how women jog when they’re pregnant; I really don’t.” That made me feel better, knowing a jock like Cora is also scratching her head over that one.
Though I initially began thinking only about new moms and their baby weight, eating after you become a parent involves much more than trying to drop those hanging-on pounds. All of a sudden there’s another eater in the household. That new eater may do fine on only breast milk for a long while, but eventually she wants food—even before they have words, children have strong opinions about food, and they will have a huge impact on the home menu. Will you insist they eat what you’re eating, prepare separate adult and kids’ meals, or find yourself matching your kid one-to-one on peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich consumption? And how do smart chefs manage to eat right in the face of a punishing lack of time and sleep?
In this chapter, you will hear how some mom-chefs got back in prebaby shape. But you’ll also hear from moms and dads about how the newest member of the family changed how they eat, and how they adapted. If you aren’t much of a home cook, it might please you to know that, until they become parents, neither are many restaurant chefs. When her daughter was about three and a half, Guarnaschelli told me, “This past year has been the most home cooking I’ve ever done. I want my daughter to see an example of a parent who cooks. There’s a certain way that you show love when you cook for someone, and I want her to feel loved in that way. I don’t do it because I’m a chef. I do it because I want her to know I love her in that way.”
Some people may find this controversial—the idea of showing love through cooking. I don’t. The feeling that comes when someone you love unconditionally is happily eating food you’ve prepared is without comparison.
Lesson 80: Smart chefs don’t stress about losing all the baby weight right away
Can we agree to stop reading interviews with actresses who claim to have lost all their pregnancy weight solely by nursing their infants or running the three steps it takes to catch a toddler? “Everyone says, ‘You’re breast-feeding—the weight falls right off you!’ But I found that as long as I was breast-feeding, I held on to weight and ate a ton. It’s the best time to eat!” says Andrea Reusing, who has a son and a daughter. “I had great eating experiences then. I’d have peanut butter with really good jam and bread and hot chocolate with whipped cream. I didn’t lose all the weight until I stopped breast-feeding.” Me too. I had this idea that making milk meant drinking milk (not a bad idea), and that drinking milk meant always eating Oreos (not a sane idea).
Karen Hatfield also took it pretty easy after the birth of her first child. “I lost twenty pounds immediately, then the other fifteen in six months. That’s my thing: I’m not going to go in the gym and kill myself to get the abs I had when I was twenty. It’s important to me to be slim, to be at an appropriate weight, but I’m not too hard on myself, and I think that’s a good thing. Also, I figured, ‘If you’re going to have another kid, you’re not going to work to get the dream body. I’ll get the trainer after the second one.’”
That would be soon. “Do you know how to deliver a baby?” Quinn Hatfield asks me by way of greeting when I enter the restaurant he runs with his, at that time, very pregnant wife. She is something of a marvel, nearing forty weeks with their second child and still at Hatfield’s every day, making pastry and managing the restaurant. I arrive in the afternoon, well before they open for dinner, and the place has a sort of sterile hush that makes me consider whether, with judicious use of the dish sanitizer, we could deliver the baby if we absolutely had to.
“With the last baby, Karen worked Saturday, we were closed on Sunday, she had the baby Monday, and she was back to work on Friday,” says Quinn in both admiration and disbelief. Says Karen: “We’re youngish, trying to run a restaurant, maybe open another one. All these things take time and commitment, and just being there.” So here she is, prioritizing. “Maybe after the second baby I’ll get a trainer,” she muses.
“I thought I was going to train you!” says Quinn, smiling at his wife.
Taking in the dining room with her eyes, she says to him, “Isn’t this enough?” She turns to me for confirmation: “Is there anything worse than your husband training you post-baby? Biggest nightmare!”
Alex Guarnaschelli had great success at taking off nearly all the weight she put on with her daughter, but says, “I’m still in the process of trying to lose my baby weight—I want to be very clear about that. I don’t want to be portrayed as anything but an ever-struggling human.” With exercise, and some decisive changes to her diet, she steadily lost about sixty pounds. “I took out the high-ticket items. I’m a carnivore at heart, so I eliminated red meat. And salad dressing.”
I find the no-dressing tack a hard-core choice. Personally, I don’t like the scrape and squeak of lettuce without at least a little slick of oil; I need dressing to marry the leaves to the other elements in the salad, like members of a band wearing the same uniform, Sgt. Pepper style.
But I admire Alex’s ability to go to the dry-salad place and even enjoy it. She explains, “I love greens. You have got to find your weird stuff that makes you laugh to yourself in the kitchen, your nutty little thing that works. I’m not telling anybody how to live. For me, I’m going to eliminate salad dressing and red meat and use my calories elsewhere and have some steamed fish so I can eat a little more food and feel satiated. I can’t handle being on a diet and not feeling satiated. Because that is how I’ll quickly go off the diet: day four of ‘I’m really hungry all the time.’”
Lesson 81: They eat with their kids
Experts from nutritionists to sociologists have validated the benefits to children of eating at least some meals together as a family. But I think it serves all of us well. While we’re encouraging our kids to eat their vegetables, chances are we are setting an example by eating them too. But there’s a tendency among schedule-challenged parents to feed their kids well at mealtimes, and later cobble something together for themselves.
Here’s one small example of why dining should be a social activity from a person’s earliest days. When their daughter first started eating solid foods, says Karen Hatfield, she and her husband treated her like their most precious customer ever. “Quinn made all her baby food, sourcing this amazing stuff from farms, all organic—red quinoa, different squashes. Fabulous.” (You can do this too, by the way; there is almost nothing that can’t be cooked soft and pureed for the toothless newcomer.) But with their ambitious schedules, they rarely slowed down to eat with her. Now, Karen continues, admitting something that is hard for her as a chef and mother: “She’s not the best eater. We’re trying to wait it out and not put too much pressure on so she doesn’t rebel.”
The pickiness concerned them enough to raise the question with their daughter’s pediatrician. “The doctor said it might have something to do with the fact that we’re never home at night,” Karen says. “Kids are more likely to eat if there’s a big dish put down on the family table and everybody’s drawing from it. I thought it made sense, and it made me feel better. It’s hard for me to eat at seven with her, but I’ve been trying to make us both dinner and sit down.”
Like the Hatfields, you too probably encounter times (perhaps several days a week) when making and eating dinner together challenges you, and there’s a temptation to sling some dinner in your children’s general direction and, when they are in bed, to have a glass of wine and a knob of cheese yourself before collapsing. But by making a simple meal and sitting down with your kids—by feeding yourself as sensibly as you expect them to eat—you may end up helping yourself too. I’ve often thought if I ate half as well as I encourage my son to eat, I’d be so healthy that you could see me glowing from space. If I’m taking the time to prepare food for him, I would do well to sit down and eat some myself.
Two or three nights a week, Ming Tsai brings home a few raw ingredients from his restaurant, Blue Ginger, to get something fast on the table by six p.m. Most nights his wife, Polly, is in charge, though she is also hustling, says Tsai. “With two kids, picking up and dropping off from squash practice or karate class, you don’t have all day to hang out and cook.” Some nights, he says, “I have dinner with my family, and then I come back for service.”
One of Andrea Reusing’s best family dining tricks is to offer a predinner crudité: “I’ll just put out a ton of vegetables before I put any other food out, so they get their vegetables in them when they’re most hungry. Then they can go to town on whatever else they want.” Hint: This works on adults too.
Reusing also makes it easy on herself, preparing adaptable foods in bulk, and keeping staples on hand. “I make a batch of chickpeas or some bean a couple times a week, and use them different ways,” she says. “Or sometimes we have egg dinners. I get the best eggs I can, from a farm.” Breakfast for dinner is almost too easy—you get it to the table fast, and very young children are delighted by the idea of turning routine upside down.
There may be times when eating a full meal with your progeny is just not practical—maybe you’re going out later and don’t want to eat twice. Wolfgang Puck often makes it home, even briefly, for dinner with his boys. But he doesn’t necessarily eat what he or his wife, Gelila, prepares for them. “I’ve eaten during the day, and I’m going to eat more afterward,” says Puck, who usually returns to Spago for dinner service. “I will nibble a bit, but not really eat. It’s an important time to all be together. Then I go back to work.”
In a best-case scenario, having a kid in the house makes you eat better than you did before. “It makes you think about the four food groups. So we’ll have more fruit salad, more vegetables,” says Frasca chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, of cooking for his young daughter. Before he heads to work, Lachlan packs her lunch most days, which might be anything from some of his restaurant’s leftover staff meal, to pasta salad, little meatballs, and raspberries “she sticks on her fingers.”
He delights in that daddy stuff, but he never really stops being a chef, and chefs are constantly watching the plates to see whether they come back to the kitchen empty. “I’m always thinking about what’s in her lunch, and I check when she comes home to see what she ate,” he says. “If she doesn’t eat it, I wonder why and I call her teacher.” I think he is joking about calling the teacher. But for chefs, and other parents, it is hard not to read your reviews. Kids can be tough food critics, and for most of us cooks, theirs are the only names in the reservation book for nearly two decades.
Lesson 82: They don’t fall into the “kiddie food” trap
Just because you eat with a kid doesn’t mean you should eat like a kid. With peanut butter and jelly in my refrigerator all the time, I sometimes have to make it invisible to myself, but doing so is surprisingly possible if there are plenty of other, more appropriate treats. A favorite Susur Lee snack: a sweet potato. Make extra next time you roast them. Nate Appleman says, “We always have nuts or dried fruit, cheese, or almond butter. I’ve actually grown to love graham crackers—they are a not-too-indulgent sweet.”
If my son had his way we would eat some type of pasta most nights. If I ate pasta at every dinner, I imagine you would be able to roll me down Fifth Avenue like a giant croquet ball through the wicket of the Washington Square arch. One way to resolve that issue is to make a pasta side dish, rather than the sole element in a meal. I try not to do even that too often, and need to remind myself that couscous and orzo are, in fact, pasta, not grains, despite their attempts to deceive me with their tiny size and grainlike shape.
Unless you are planning to make multiple dinners every night (don’t—home is not a restaurant!), a better way to bridge the kiddie-food/grown-up-food divide is to do what chefs do and introduce your kids to a variety of foods—and make them appealing to young palates—so you can get off the pasta train.
Cat Cora and her wife, Jennifer, cook the healthy dinners they want—grilled fish, chicken, vegetables—and have found that putting any of those things on a stick sells them to their four boys without a fuss. “The kids love it,” she says. “We’ll do a salmon skewer and romesco sauce [a Spanish sauce of nuts, garlic, olive oil, and peppers], or lamb with mint-yogurt sauce and pita bread.”
Romesco sauce? Yes! First of all, it’s pink, if you have the kind of child to whom that makes a difference. Who says kid food needs to be bland? “When I sautéed vegetables for my kids, I would add oyster sauce, or clear clam juice,” says Susur Lee, father of three. “The umami sweetness is attractive to kids.” Another tip: They might need vegetables prepped slightly differently from yours. “Dice them small for children,” he adds.
“My kids like vegetables, as long as they are flavorful,” says Ming Tsai. “I’ll use a cast-iron pan to caramelize a bunch of garlic and sauté broccoli with vegetable stock, put some herbed panko on top of it, under the broiler for eight minutes. I take pride and love cooking for my family. They love good food and appreciate it, so it’s fun to do.”
Lesson 83: They cook with their kids
Getting kids into the kitchen is another way to get them excited about the kind of food you want to serve and eat. On Sunday, his day off, Tsai likes to cook with his boys. “We’ll make dumplings, sushi, stir-fries, fried rice.” Tsai prefers the nutrients, fiber, and flavor of brown rice, but knows that kids are more apt to go for white. His solution is to mix the two in fried rice, and his guys, he says, don’t notice the difference.
Reusing, too, taps her offspring as mini sous chefs. “I like to make something with them that they get invested in but that doesn’t create a lot of work,” she says. “Like ricotta gnocchi. I make the gnocchi, and let them spoon them into the boiling water.”
“Last night we made bread and onion soup,” reports Nate Appleman of a Sunday evening spent cooking with his young son. I don’t have statistics on this, but I feel safe in saying that the majority of American children are not clamoring for onion soup most nights. Could Oliver be sold on it? Yes, Appleman found, though it took two attempts. “I burned the onions because we were playing trains or something,” he admits. “It was a big, black mess. I changed the pot and it worked out. We also did the Jim Lahey no-knead bread, which turned out great.” (Lahey’s much-reproduced method can be found at www.sullivanstreetbakery.com/recipes). Appleman shows me a photo of his son holding the loaf—the boy looks as proud as can be. Remember the rule about eating only really special bread? This would be that.
Lesson 84: Smart chefs don’t sacrifice shared food experiences for their diets
Besides the convenience of cooking one meal for all, eating the same food has another benefit, and that is teaching kids that good food is good for everybody. Just because I’m watching how I eat, I don’t want my son growing up to think that certain foods are okay for him, but not for Mommy or Daddy.
Some chefs agree with me. “There’s enough advertising to make kids self-conscious” about food and diet and weight, says Marc Murphy, a dad of two. “If my kids want an ice-cream cone, even if I’m not that hungry, I’ll get an ice-cream cone, because I don’t want to be that parent who’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t eat that!’ We’ll all have ice cream together. It’s fun. You want to teach them to live and enjoy life.”
While it can upset my own best intentions for the day, I do the same when I’m out with my son. We live in New York, where as we stroll up the avenue there is not only the siren call of the Mister Softee truck, but pizza by the slice to be had, soft pretzels with salt and mustard. We don’t always stop for these treats, but to pass them by altogether would be sort of tragic. Honestly, if I were ever to become too careful an eater to enjoy a greasy slice from Ray’s Pizza, I don’t belong in this city. So I try to find a balance, for myself and for him, hoping that as he grows up he’s able to make good choices on his own.
Rick Bayless feels like he has accomplished that. “My daughter is now going to college. Sometimes she eats good food, sometimes not. But what she’s learned is to be aware when she’s full. She’ll say, ‘This is superdelicious, but this is how much I can eat of it.’ I think that will stand her in good stead for the rest of her life.”
Traditional Greek gyros consist of lamb with tzatziki wrapped in pita. Cora retains the tzatziki (a garlicky yogurt sauce) in her version, which uses either grilled or baked fish. She recommends halibut, which is firm and holds up to being eaten by hand, gyros style—kids can assemble their own. But napkins are essential for all.
serves 4 to 6
FOR THE TZATZIKI:
1 cup Greek (strained) yogurt
2 tablespoons crumbled feta cheese
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh mint
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 medium cucumber, peeled
FOR THE HALIBUT:
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more to sear the fish and to oil the baking dish
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1½ teaspoons sea salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1½ pounds center-cut halibut fillets, skin removed
5 Roma tomatoes, about 1¼ pounds
1 small red onion
½ cup kalamata olives, pitted and halved
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh oregano
2 tablespoons parsley, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
FOR SERVING:
1 head butter lettuce
1 head radicchio
Tzatziki
Pepperoncini, drained and sliced, optional
Sliced scallions, optional
1. Preheat a grill to medium-high or turn an oven to 350ºF.
2. Make the tzatziki: In a medium bowl, combine all the ingredients except cucumber. Using a box grater, grate the cucumber directly over the yogurt mixture, rotating the cucumber and grating until all the flesh is used, stopping when you reach the seeds. Stir well, cover the bowl, and refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight.
3. For the halibut: In a baking dish large enough to hold the fillets in a single layer, combine the 2 tablespoons olive oil, lime juice, chili powder, cumin, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Add the halibut and turn to coat thoroughly with the marinade. Let the fillets marinate for 10 minutes to absorb the flavors while you make the tomato salad.
4. For the tomato salad: In a medium bowl, mix the tomatoes, red onion, olives, oregano, parsley, olive oil, and lime juice. Season with salt and pepper to taste and mix well.
5. Cook the halibut: Remove the halibut fillets from the marinade. Brush the fillets with a little olive oil on each side before placing them on the grill. Cook the fillets until they start to turn opaque around the sides, about 3 to 5 minutes. Using a spatula, turn the fish carefully and grill on the other side until opaque throughout, about 3 to 5 minutes.
6. If you are baking the halibut, remove the fish from the marinade. Lightly oil the baking dish and place the halibut in a single layer. Bake in the preheated oven until firm to the touch and opaque throughout, about 15 minutes. When the fish is done, remove it from the oven and let it rest in the pan.
7. For serving: Remove the core from the lettuce and radicchio. Gently separate the lettuce leaves from one another. For extra-crisp lettuce cups, soak the lettuce leaves in very cold water for a few minutes. Remove them from the water and pat dry with paper towels. Make a cup by lining a whole lettuce leaf with a radicchio leaf (you can use 2 lettuce leaves if you prefer more lettuce with your gyros and to reduce the chance of leaks).
8. Flake a generous portion of fish into each of the lettuce cups. Top with the tomato salad, drizzle with the tzatziki, and garnish with pepperoncinis and scallions, if desired. Serve immediately.
Adapted from Cooking from the Hip: Fast, Easy, Phenomenal Meals by Cat Cora, with Ann Krueger Spivak. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.
Naomi Pomeroy’s Quinoa with Summer Vegetables
This is a very adaptable recipe that Pomeroy makes at home for herself and her daughter. Use the vegetables you most like, or whatever you have on hand. Corn cut off the cob is a great addition. Make sure to rinse the quinoa well before cooking to avoid any bitterness. Even with that extra step, quinoa is among the fastest-cooking grains—a relief when you don’t have time to wait for brown rice or others that take longer. It also has a fair amount of protein.
serves 4
½ head broccoli, cut into small florets
½ cup rinsed quinoa
½ cup avocado, diced
6 cherry tomatoes
⅓ cucumber, diced
2 green onions
1 cup beans (says Naomi: Two kinds mixed is nice; I used kidney and cannellini)
¼ cup loosely packed cilantro or basil
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
juice of half a lime
Pinch sugar, salt, pepper (to taste)
1. Over boiling water, lightly steam the broccoli florets until bright green but still tender, then cool in the refrigerator.
2. In small saucepan with a tight-fitting lid, bring 1 cup of water to a boil. After rinsing the quinoa well, add it to boiling water with a pinch of salt. Turn heat to low and cover. Cook 15 minutes until the water is absorbed. Remove from heat, allow to stand 5 minutes, and fluff with a fork. Place cooked quinoa in a large bowl and set in the fridge to cool.
3. Meanwhile, prep the vegetables and herbs, chopping and cutting as needed.
4. To assemble, add the vegetables to the quinoa and toss gently with the sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, lime juice, and a pinch each of sugar, salt, and pepper.
NOTE: This salad will last a few days in the fridge, but if you are storing it to eat later, don’t add the avocado until just before serving.
Adapted from Naomi Pomeroy.
Alex Guarnaschelli’s Pea Salad with Basil and Pea Shoots
While she sometimes craves pure, unadorned salads, Alex recognizes that most people like some dressing. The vinaigrette, with three sources of acid and an adjustable amount of oil, would be good on almost any green salad you like. I’ve dialed down the mustard from Guarnaschelli’s recipe; you may add more to taste. Peas are a vegetable that even some green-averse children like—the tiny amount of sugar and the pea shoots make the pea flavor even more pronounced—and the milder dressing should appeal.
serves 4 to 6 as a side dish
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon capers
2 teaspoons caper brine
Salt and freshly ground pepper
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup chopped fresh tarragon, washed, dried, and stems removed
Granulated sugar, as needed (she recommends superfine, which dissolves quickly)
8 ounces snow peas, washed, ends trimmed
¾ cup shelled spring (English) peas
8 ounces sugar snap peas, washed, ends trimmed
¼ cup basil leaves, stemmed, washed, dried
¼ cup pea shoots, washed and dried
1. In a medium bowl, whisk together the Dijon mustard, lemon juice, and sherry vinegar. Add the capers, caper brine, and a pinch of salt and pepper to taste. Slowly whisk in the olive oil and add the tarragon. Taste and season with salt and pepper, if needed. Set aside.
2. Bring a large pot of water to a boil over medium heat. Add salt until the water tastes like seawater; then add a generous pinch of sugar.
3. Prepare an ice bath. Fill a large bowl halfway with ice cubes and add some cold water. Put a colander squarely inside the ice bath. The colander will keep you from having to pick the peas out from among the ice cubes in the ice bath.
4. Cook the peas: Add the snow peas to the boiling water and cook until they are bright green and tender, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove the peas from the water with a strainer and transfer them to the ice bath. Allow them to sit until cooled. Drain on a kitchen towel–lined plate.
5. Bring the water back up to a boil and add the shelled peas. Cook until the water comes back to a boil, about 1 minute. Use the strainer to remove the peas and plunge them into the ice bath. Allow them to sit until cooled. Discard the blanching water.
6. Remove the peas from the ice bath and spread them out onto the kitchen towel over a flat surface. Use another kitchen towel to gently pat them dry. Transfer the towel to a plate and put the peas into the refrigerator to chill until you are ready to serve.
7. Transfer the chilled shelled peas, snow peas, and raw sugar snap peas to a medium bowl. Stir to blend. Toss with the vinaigrette, basil leaves, and pea shoots and season with salt, to taste. Transfer the salad to a platter and serve immediately.
Adapted from Alex Guarnaschelli.
serves 4
Canola oil for cooking
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh ginger
1 onion, cut into small dice
3 carrots, grated, or 1 cup of carrot nubs, sliced
1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced, white and green separated
1 pound ground pork
5 cups cold cooked brown-and-white-rice combo, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry (alternatively, place cooked rice on a sheet tray and place in freezer to cool and dry)
1 tablespoon of naturally brewed soy sauce
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1. In a wok or nonstick sauté pan over high heat, add a touch of oil, garlic, and ginger, and stir-fry until soft, about 30 seconds.
2. Add onions, carrot, and scallion whites and stir-fry 3 minutes until al dente—cooked through but not too soft.
3. Add the ground pork and cook until pork colors and is thoroughly cooked (about 8 minutes).
4. Add rice; stir-fry until heated through. Season with soy sauce, kosher salt, and freshly ground black pepper and taste to adjust seasonings.
5. Transfer to a platter, garnish with green scallions, and serve immediately.
Adapted from Ming Tsai.
BEHIND THE LESSONS:
Michael Psilakis’s Emotion on a Plate
Michael Psilakis’s mother wept openly when he told her that he was skipping law school to become a chef. “I told her, ‘I’m going to own a restaurant!’ She cried and said, ‘That’s what your grandfather did!’ That’s not the way it’s supposed to go. Anybody who comes from an immigrant family, they want progress.”
Psilakis’s father was a fur trader. “When the Greeks came over here they either went into the food industry or the fur industry. I worked with him for many years as a child, and unfortunately the fur industry fell apart in this country, probably when I was about fifteen. That was a trying experience for us. We lost a lot. It was a struggle.”
So his degree in accounting and plan to go to law school was seen as a triumph. But for Psilakis, “Becoming a chef was sort of natural, because food was always something that was not only very enjoyable to me, but also something that I really loved to be able to give to people. For most chefs, food is a gift and allows us to create what we feel inside emotionally, and transfer that to a plate and give it to someone.” Once it was clear to his parents that he was on his way to being a star chef, not a struggling restaurant cook, “they were happy.”
When his father died in 2007, he says, “I realized how much he and I communicated with food. I started writing to deal with his passing, writing down all these stories about moments we spent together, and I realized food kept coming up as a common theme in these stories. I decided to write a cookbook as an homage to him and my family.” Food is one way many people connect to their loved ones. But for Psilakis, it goes further. “Fine dining for me is also a means of expressing an emotional connection; I just use food as a medium to communicate that,” he tells me. “So you use a pen, and I’m using a piece of meat.” It’s an interesting proposition: While everyone understands how a comforting family recipe evokes a loved one’s memory, a chef has a much higher bar, trying to emotionally reach hordes of anonymous diners who pull up to his restaurant tables each night.
Psilakis had the opportunity to reach out on an unusually grand scale in 2009, when he was invited to cook at the White House for Greek Independence Day. “The only thing I can liken it to was if you got a medal in the Olympics and you stood on a podium and heard your national anthem.” It was an outsize expression of the sort of progress for which his immigrant parents had hoped. While his father wasn’t there to see it, he did get many letters from Greek-Americans, strangers to him, voicing their joy. While he thinks often about how what he puts on a plate affects a diner, he hadn’t anticipated his own emotional response. “It blindsided me: I had a sense of pride that I didn’t really expect.”