Don't Try This at Home (10 page)

The Traveling Chef

TOM COLICCHIO

Tom Colicchio, originally from Elizabeth, New Jersey, is the chef I
co-owner of New York's celebrated Gramercy Tavern, ranked
New Yorker's #1 favorite restaurant in the 2005
Zagat Survey,
as
well as chef"Iowner of Craft, the 2002 James Beard Best New
Restaurant in America. In 2002 Colicchio opened Craftbar, a
casual adjunct to Craft, and CraftSteak in Las Vegas' MGM
Grand Hotel. In 2003 he followed up with 'wichcraft, next door
to Craftbar in New York's Flatiron District, bringing Craft's ethic
of simplicity and great ingredients to the ever-popular sandwich.
His first book,
Think Like a Chef,
won the James Beard Best
General Cookbook in 2001, and was followed by
Craft of Cooking: Notes and Recipes from a Restaurant Kitchen
in
2003. He is married to filmmaker Lori Silverbush, and is the
father of Dante, who is a big fan of his father's scrambled eggs.

O
NE OF THE great benefits of being a chef is that you get to travel. Cooking around the world has helped me learn about
different cuisines, people, and customs. Traveling widely as a chef has also taught me a few valuable lessons about my own
craft.

My first chance to see the world as a cook was at the age of twenty; I was on my way from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Gascony
region in the Southwest of France, for a
stage
at a famed two-star inn and hotel. This was to be my first time away from home, and my family threw me a big going-away party.
I left a couple weeks before my
stage
began, figuring it would allow me plenty of time to get to Gascony from Brussels, where my $99 People's Express flight would
touch down. On the flight over I found myself seated near a friend, a waiter at a restaurant where I had worked in New Jersey.
He was on his way to Brussels to work as a model. He invited me to join him for a week, as he was crashing in the apartment
of two gorgeous Belgian girls—sisters. I quickly agreed, figuring that this, too, would be an important learning experience.
The girls welcomed me enthusiastically. An actual American chef! They treated me like a rock star. The apartment was so small,
it had only one bed. This was great! Let the education begin!

As I recall, I later found out that one of the sisters had a boyfriend. The other one was . . . uninterested, to say the least.
I learned that striking out overseas felt exactly as it did at home—it sucked.

But life went on, and I had a great experience in France. My career steadily grew when I returned to the States, and many
years later I found myself bombarded with invitations to travel the world over. I've cooked alone and with teams of chefs,
on cruise ships in the Baltics, in the great hotel kitchens of Tokyo, for Olympic athletes in Athens, and for food enthusiasts
in private homes around the world. It's always a thrill, but coordinating a meal (or numerous meals) in a faraway place is
never without its hazards. As I travel from place to place with my cooks, trying to raise awareness for important causes or
just to show people a good time, I've learned two things.

1. The folks inviting me will promise the world: a first-class kitchen loaded with the best equipment, an eager and skilled
prep staff hungering for a chance to learn alongside a "celebrity chef," extraordinary local ingredients . . . wild game,
organic vegetables . . . etc., etc.

2. I must never rely on this. Ever.

Plenty of events have found me and my loyal crew cooking in a shoebox kitchen with two working burners. We've learned that
local staff often don't show up, or don't show up with knife skills; and as for those amazing, local ingredients . . . let's
just say I've determined exactly how many frozen squab I can fit into my fishing bag. If I don't bring it, you don't eat it.

You may think I'm joking, but I'm dead serious. On one trip to the Bahamas, where I was asked to teach a cooking class, I
packed a couple dozen squab into my fishing bag. All went well until I hit Customs in Nassau. The Bahamian customs agent didn't
give a damn about my cooking class, but once I palmed him $50, he was happy to wave me through. From this I learned to always
have some ready cash at hand—literally.

For bigger events, my cooks and I have the travel thing down to a science, but even so, things sometimes go awry. Once we
were invited to cook an important dinner for Conde Nast's worldwide ad sales team, in a country club just outside Detroit.
The event was a sit-down five-course dinner for 250 people. In other words . . . 1,250 portions, i.e., a
lot
of food. Experience dictated that I pack every last morsel and bring it all along with me on the plane. This might seem anal,
but my relationships with farmers and growers have accustomed me to great ingredients, and my style of cooking wholly depends
on this. So my cooks and I packed it all up—short ribs sealed in their Cryovac casing, shelled lobster claws and tails nestled
into giant plastic bins, tubs of veal demi-glace and bundles of fresh herbs—crammed everything into large, insulated cartons
and hauled it along with us to the airport. At the terminal, the gate agents informed us that the cartons each weighed too
much to go on the plane. We offered to pay the extra fare—and were politely declined. As the minutes ticked by and boarding
began, we offered to ship everything freight, but were told that the cartons exceeded FAA weight regulations. So I got on
the phone to D'Artagnan, the legendary specialty foods company, whose warehouses were nearby in Newark, and asked them to
rush over more insulated cartons, which they did. We missed our flight while my cooks and I opened each of the boxes in the
middle of the terminal, and under the wide-eyed gaze of vacationing families, repacked the food into many more boxes, each
weighing under the freight regulation 50 pounds. We were able to rebook onto a later flight, which would still get us into
Detroit in time to prep for the dinner. The new cartons were wheeled off on hand trucks to wherever freight goes.

In Detroit we deplaned and awaited our boxes. They didn't arrive. The airline insisted that the crates would be on the next
plane, due in two hours. My cooks snuck nervous glances at me and at their watches, and we settled into those plastic bucket
seats in the Northwest terminal to wait. In the meantime, I chatted with the driver who had been sent to meet us.

"You know," I told him, "we have a lot of boxes coming. Dozens, in fact. And they're quite large."

The driver laughed it off. "I have a truck," he answered. "I drive entire hockey teams in that thing. You ever see a hockey
team—those bags of theirs?"

I suggested he send for a second truck anyway. He shook his head at my worrying. I think he chalked it up to a New York thing.

Eventually the food arrived. My able-bodied cooks and I hauled them one by one off the conveyer belt and stacked them. The
driver watched as the stacks grew, then shook his head. "No way are those gonna fit in my truck."

I sprinted to Hertz and rented two Ford Expeditions. We squeezed the food into the truck and the two vans and headed to the
country club where 250 people expected the meal of a lifetime in a few short hours. We got there late. We worked our asses
off. We sweated. Conde Nast arrived. The food went out. And none of the guests that night knew just how close they had come
to going hungry.

On another occasion, however, they did. I had donated a dinner for twelve in a private home as an auction gift to a children's
charity. The day of the private dinner arrived and we packed our boxes and loaded them into my SUV to drive out to the host's
house in New Jersey. The weather report said snow, so we left extra early. The snow hit, along with driving ice and sleet,
and the trip to this bedroom community—ordinarily a forty-five-minute drive—took three hours. The hostess began calling my
cell phone at ten-minute intervals, alternating between tears and tirades. As her guests arrived, we were trapped in a highway
whiteout. I felt awful.

We showed up to a house full of guests and flew into action. This is when I know how good my cooks are. We barely need to
speak as we whirl around the kitchen dicing, sauteing, stirring, and plating; our communication is wordless and complete.
Suddenly, I heard: "Oh, shit!" I looked up to find that Johnny Schaefer, my right-hand man at Gramercy Tavern, had gone pale.
"We forgot the lobster," he said. Our piece de resistance that night was a favorite from the menu at Gramercy, poached lobster
served in a lobster sauce gently scented with vanilla. We had the sauce, even the garnish, but somehow the lobster hadn't
made it onto the truck.

A long beat while we all just stood there. Suddenly I hit on an idea. We had brought a few beautiful lobes of foie gras, originally
meant to be roasted, sliced, and served on rounds of toast as hors d'ouevres, but the late hour had pushed us right into dinner.
To make up for the missing lobster, we poached the foie gras and served it in the lobster sauce. The dinner was a hit. If
I remember correctly, the wife got thoroughly drunk and hugged me on the way out.

There have been times when I simply can't bring food with me. Invited to cook a dinner on the
Sea Goddess,
a small high-end cruise ship set to sail through the Mediterranean, I was told I could purchase my ingredients before we set
sail in the markets of Helsinki. I did just that, availing myself of the wonderful fresh produce and seafood. I loaded everything
into the galley's walk-in and headed to my cabin for a quick nap as the ship pushed off. A couple hours later, when I returned
to start prepping, I found that my food was gone. The cooks, prepping for lunch and other daily meals, had seen my hand-chosen
ingredients, preferred them to the stuff they normally had to cook with, and had helped themselves. From that I learned to
label everything that goes into another chef's kitchens as MINE—DO NOT TOUCH.

One favorite trip is my annual jaunt to the Aspen Food and Wine Festival, in June. I'm always looking for ways to spend more
time with my son, so one year I decided to bring Dante, then three, along for the ride. I was invited to participate in a
panel discussion with a host of other chefs, and rather than track down a babysitter, I decided to stash Dante with his Legos
under the table at my feet. The long cloth kept him hidden out of sight of the audience members who'd paid a hefty price to
hear me and others talk about food. About halfway through the panel, I noticed that everything we "experts" were saying was
eliciting peals of delighted laughter. I mean, we were killing them. One look down and I understood why. My son had lifted
the long cloth, discovered hundreds of people in the room, and had started to entertain them with funny faces. Dante was such
a hit that the festival organizers brought him up to the microphone at a later panel and asked him to introduce Mary Sue Milliken
and Susan Feniger of the Border Grill, aka the "Two Hot Tamales." Not one to waste the limelight, my son grabbed the mic and
introduced the talented chefs as "Two Hot Poo-pies!" Boy, was I proud.

Another year at the Aspen Food and Wine Fest, Michael Romano and I were asked to cook a dinner for American Express Platinum
Card members at the Ritz-Carlton. Again I had decided to prepare squab, one of my favorites, as the main course. The kitchen
was a long trek from the dining room so I asked the hotel to set up a grill nearby. They accommodated me by placing the grill
just outside the dining building, where it abutted a parking garage. Moments before the dinner, the smoke from the grill made
its way to the parking structure's internal fire alarm and set it off, which in turn triggered the alarms for the entire hotel.
Soon, panicked guests in their haste to get away began streaming out of the hotel's back door in various stages of undress,
even knocking over our prep table, where my squab and Michael's food went spilling onto the concrete. One guy had apparently
been caught in a hotel fire in Hawaii and no amount of explanation could get him to calm down. I learned there to look for
hair-trigger fire alarms (and not set up my prep table in the line of traffic).

Traveling for work means performing a delicate tap dance with my schedule—one that allows me time in the kitchens of my restaurants,
face time with my staff, as well as a decent personal life. But sometimes the dance falls flat. Case in point: recently I
was invited to perform with a friend's rock band at D'Artagnan's gala twenty-fifth-anniversary bash. I'm no Clapton, but
I take my playing seriously enough that I'd practiced nonstop for weeks in the early mornings and late at night, driving my
poor wife to distraction. This was a dream come true for me; I was set to solo on two numbers and play backup on the rest,
and I had to get it right. The only problem: I was slated to attend a major food and wine festival in Knoxville. The organizers
had asked me to teach a cooking course one day and to cook at a charity dinner the following night, and the concert fell smack
in between. So I arranged to fly home after the class, play the gig, and then fly right back into Knoxville for the charity
dinner. As fate would have it, a freak March blizzard on the night in question kept me grounded in Knoxville and the band
went on without me. That was the beginning and the end of my rock star career.

This past summer, I took off with Dante, now twelve, for the summer Olympics, where I was invited to cook for guests on a
ship harbored in Athens. I was asked to fax the recipes ahead of time so that the food and beverage team could shop and prep
for my arrival—this was crucial since scheduling conflicts were keeping me from arriving until the morning of my big dinner.
As Dante and I boarded the boat, I was immediately summoned into an emergency meeting with the food and beverage team.

"We don't have your food," they told me.

I figured it was the jet lag affecting my hearing, but sure enough, there wasn't so much as a breadstick awaiting my arrival.
"Didn't you get the recipes?" I asked. They had. But they hadn't understood them, they told me. So they did nothing.