405: Rocco DiSpirito

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0:32Chefs are very consistent in their thinking. We're always thinking about the food and the people we're serving. And whether we're on TV or not, you know, certainly the TV brought a lot of new issues. A lot of it is duplicated by social media. So like being on and being in the spotlight all the time is certainly duplicated by social media. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbart.

0:59Rocco Despierdo has some deep cooking history in New York City, and we go over all of it in this highly entertaining episode. Rocco was the chef behind Union Pacific, a legendary restaurant that operated in the late 1990s and led to Rocco's star turn on one of the first food reality TV shows, the infamous The Restaurant that ran on NBC from 2003 to 2004. On this episode, we talk about the show and how it led to a generation of food programming. We also hear about Rocco's cookbook career and what excites him in food today. I hope you enjoy this conversation with a real legend in the game.

1:45Rocco Despierta, welcome to This is Taste. Are you messing with TikTok right now? I am, yeah. I like it a lot. What are you doing on TikTok? Well, I think, first of all, it's probably one of the best places to learn how to cook visually. YouTube is great, but it's just so tiring and boring and takes so long. And ramping up the videos takes forever. And TikTok is immediate. Yeah. In 30 seconds, you learn how to make a dish. I mean, it's pure entertainment. Especially if you know how to cook. Yeah, true. If you know how to cook and you watch a well-made 30-second video on TikTok, it could be the equivalent of a two-week education in a real restaurant.

2:13I agree. And it's like entertainment, too, which I think, back to your career, I mean, you've been doing food entertainment on television for over two decades, which is dope. I mean, you were like the original. But who's counting? I mean, we are in a retrospective interview that we're doing here. This is your life, Rocco Despirito. If you must. If you must. Okay, first off, what's good in New York right now, restaurant-wise? Are you going out to spots? Yeah, I hate to say it, but I'm going to say it. Teresi. No hate. Rich has been on the show. Amazing. Yeah, it's a good restaurant. Amazing. Yeah.

2:40So it reminds me of a little bit when everyone, every chef in New York was basically gangbusters every day. How can we change lives? How can we make magic? Every dish is going to blow people's minds. That's what sort of their ambition level is. Yeah. And it's nice to see it because it's been a little hard to find the last few years. Well, I had John George in here recently and we were talking about Spice Market. With the exception of him. Yeah, a little flex here. But I felt like it was Treacy and Spice Market have a similar theatrical approach. You walk in, it's like, oh, yeah. That's a good point.

3:15Yeah. Very true. Very true. We have to go back to Union Pacific. We do? Who says? Who says? Did Diana say? No. Diana's my editor, by the way. She's the best editor in the world. Don't try to steal her. Yeah, right? We're talking a little trade stuff. Your little publisher's weekly trades. No, I want to know when you're like just like in a quiet time in your life and you're reflecting on life and you think about Union Pacific, what pops into your head right away about that time? So what pops into my head is the amazing cooks that are now all incredible chefs in their own right that I had access to back then.

3:51There, it was, um, New York was flush with amazing young people who wanted to learn how to cook, who were willing to do whatever. And, uh, you know, when I say do whatever, I, I, I just mean cook, you know, work and cook and, and learn how to put in the time and, uh, perform the ritual of coming to, you know, work every day and, and cooking through the night, doing their best. And, you know, things are a little different now. that's not the focus for a lot of people. So when you have 20, 30, 40 people like that that you can tap into every day, you can really do magical things that we were able to do that thanks to all of those people.

4:32Josh comes to mind. Josh was his last name? Yeah, Josh DeShellis. Yeah, of course, Josh DeShellis. Great, great. I mean, great, great, incredible cook. Such great energy. Dave Crane, Dave Coleman, Carla Lally. music was there at that time. She's now doing amazing things on her own. Cookbooks, one of our authors. She's amazing. Yes, that's right. Let me ask you, I mean, when Ruth Royshaw dropped the review, and I'm going to quote it, Mr. Despierdo has an interesting mind. He seems to think about flavor in ways that ordinary people don't. I've yet to taste anything on Mr. Despierdo's menu that is not wonderful.

5:08So when Ruth Royshaw rolls in and drops this review, really, really high praise what happens to you and your restaurant and your life. I don't want to pretend it wasn't a big deal. It was a major moment for all of us. We waited for her to come in and tell us what she thought. We all respected her so much. We hung on every word of Ruth Reichel. I don't know if you remember, if you were around back then, you were a little young for it. but Ruth's word was the opinion that mattered back then. And, you know, she did her homework. She ate two, three, four, five, six times. If she had to, she did the disguises.

5:47I mean, she really was in it 100%. And so when she said something good, you had to take her word for her. You had to believe her. And it felt great. I mean, it was true validation from a real hero of mine and all of ours. Yeah, and, you know, she did the same in L.A. with Michael McCarty's restaurant. and put chefs on the map back in L.A. in the 70s, and she does the same in the 90s in New York. And, you know, you're a young, rising talent. You get this great review. What happens to you personally as, like, your profile after Ruth writes this review? Well, naturally, she brought a lot of attention to the restaurant.

6:22She reviewed it twice in the same year. She came in once, and I'll never forget the night we were redoing her table, because I wasn't happy with how the dishes came out. So I decided to hold all six dishes and make them all over again. And she got home late. Her babysitter had to stay late, so she was very upset. Wow. You just slowed down service. I slowed everything down. And I just, you know, snail's pace. And she had a young child at the time. She told me. She said, people are waiting. We have babysitters. We have to go home. Yeah. And so she gave me a very nice two-star review, which was wonderful, but not what we were going after.

7:01And then nine months later, it came in and wrote the second review, which was full of the wonderful quotes that you read earlier. And it definitely changed the profile of the restaurant. At that time, three stars in the New York Times meant a lot. Absolutely. Very rare, rarefied place. Yeah. And there's no internet. I mean, this is like, right. I think we have to constantly remind people this is pre-social, pre-internet. Yeah. And just like print magazines and print publications meant the world, particularly for New York City, which had eight, nine million people reading it and wanting to know where to go.

7:35I mean, how do you and you didn't have a resi. So how are you like what's your what's your reservation line like? Yeah, we had our own. We had Pete Menendez, a guy who took reservations who now runs his own thing. Another great guy. We had to come up with our own reservation system, you know, open table. And those things were were things that we were just starting to talk about back then. The technology that helps us all that we all rely on now. We had to do our own schedules. Imagine that. We had to calculate our own tips. We had to add food cost up by hand. On paper. On paper. Yeah, paper gets lost, paper gets a stain, and you're kind of fucked.

8:07We had clipboards back then. I was cleaning up something. I moved recently, so I've been emptying boxes, and I came across a bunch of clipboards, and I thought, well, we don't need those anymore. Yeah. Yeah, so the New York Times review was the review that made or broke your restaurant. And the Zagat was also a very important, another very important piece of information that we relied on. We bought five Zagats, one for the car, one for the bike, one for home, one for the... Completely. I remember having multiple copies. We had them everywhere, yeah. No, and this was before smartphones, before you had a map with a bunch of restaurants.

8:41You had basically a guide. I want to go back a little bit further to Les Penas. I mean, working under Greg Kuntz, I feel like that's an era... You're working with Andrew Carmelini, Floyd Kortos, Corey Lee, David Chang is maybe there as an extern. And you're there. And what's that like? And working under Gray, who I think is RIP, was a legend in our industry. Gray was from another planet. There's no question. Gray had standards we hadn't heard of or thought of yet. And he had, you know, techniques and ways of doing things that no one had ever encountered before. He worked for one of my heroes, Freddy Girardet.

9:18And my plan was to work for Gray to get to Freddy Girardet. day. You know, little did I know that working with Greg was going to be more than enough. And I worked right next to Floyd. Floyd was on the station next to me. I remember very well working with him and thinking how special he was back then. There were a lot of special people in that kitchen, especially Carmelini, of course, and Chang and many others. And it was a good place for young, ambitious people like us to learn the craft, to also recognize that we knew much less than we thought about the craft because, again, he was from a different place in time.

9:54And when you thought you knew how to peel a carrot, he showed you a way that you never even realized was possible. Extraordinary moment in time. A lot of what he did there inspired my next few moves and how I ran my kitchen in terms of standards and mise en place and execution for food. I didn't know until I worked for Gray that you could send things back, that you could stop in the middle of the service and have everyone redo everything because it wasn't good. I didn't realize that those were standards that were possible. Now, you could call them unproductive if you want, but at the same time, if you ate at Les Spinas at that time, you knew you were going to get a near perfect.

10:32This is brigade-style cooking. It's au cuisine. It's like what the French guys kind of established in France and New York in the 90s. This is definitely the way the proper three stars ran. I got a question. And like tonally, how was the, what was the vibe in the kitchen? Because I think we've had this like a little revisionist history about like, you know, bad people in kitchens. We do not need to go into that in detail, but I'd like to know. Are you sure you don't want to spend a couple hours doing that? It'd be so fun. Rocco, we could. I mean, if you want, we could. I don't want to relitigate, but I do want to say like, you know, there's been the sense that if you have a stern word in the kitchen, you're an awful person.

11:07Greg Koontz clearly had a vibe and it was not always positive. let's just be clear for the record what it was like tonally in that kitchen we those who worked there um practically begged him to let us work there after seeing it you know where everyone trailed or staged for a few days beforehand um we knew what we're getting into we wanted to be there we understood what the tone was and what the expectations were we were more concerned of about whether we could live up to those expectations versus you know criticizing him and his approach. We had a lot of fun in that kitchen, believe it or not.

11:42There was a lot of laughter. There were some real characters. Christophe the saussier was like the French Jim Carrey. He made us laugh all day long. Troy Dupuis made us laugh all day long. So while Gray was very serious about food and had standards that you could not work around, there were no workarounds for his results. You know, you had to deliver the results he asked for. He was very straightforward about them, very transparent about them. There was no surprises. He told you beforehand the eight-sided, Pomme Chateau had to be eight-sided. Yeah, if you're hitting seven, you're out the kitchen for that.

12:16He didn't serve it, and he made you do it over again. And that's what we were there for, because while that was present in New York at the time, it wasn't accessible to a lot of American chefs. What he did that was a first was allow Americans to work in a French brigade system in New York City. He was one of the first to really open the doors to all the American cooks like me who were running around looking for that kind of experience, which is why I ended up not going to Freddy's here today, because I felt like I got that experience in New York, which was incredible. I don't know that anybody's licking their wounds saying, you know, I wish I didn't work for that guy.

12:49It was, you know, time not well spent. It's not true at all. I think it was a founding. It was it was foundational for ask Andrew, ask can't ask Floyd now, of course. But Ask Anybody was foundational for all of us. Yeah, and really, the names you mentioned. And I would go back and work there two more years if I could today. I'd love to hear that. You would go work in the brigad? Oh, my God. I'd kill for an experience like that. Let's put it on camera. Let's put you in the brigad. I mean, this clearly— Ask Andrew. Ask all of them. If they could run or feel a kitchen like that again, what they would do for that.

13:20And then he would later open, like, Cafe Grey's and Grey's and other restaurants. Yeah, he did. And Upper House in Hong Kong. Yep. were we tired every day at the end of the day? Sure. Did we sometimes wonder if what we produced was good enough? Sure. But it was his name on the restaurant, and he had to make those decisions in the end, and that's how it works. I'm glad we established your background, your culinary background, highly acclaimed from Ruth Royce and many others, working under a cafe. Yeah, me too. Thanks. Yeah, working under Greg Koontz. And the pivot is this. In 2004, you started a reality show called The Restaurant.

13:59I'm going to guess like 5 % of our listeners know what the fuck that was, know what the restaurant was. But I certainly was writing about food at that time. And I knew what it was, which was truly the first time a restaurant was being shown in some form of reality television on national network television. And it was a huge moment for food and the zeitgeist. I mean, Bourdain is writing his books a few years prior and obviously capturing attention. but you are like truly one of the original TV celebrity chefs. What is going through your mind when you're on television in this way, on network television, on NBC, on like when ratings were, it was watch.

14:38Yeah. You know, same thing that's going through my mind today. And same thing that was going through my mind before, you know, are we going to be ready for service? Is the food going to be good enough? Am I going to be happy with the results? Are we going to make people happy tonight? Are people going to leave the restaurant thinking it was worth the exercise, worth the expense. Chefs are very consistent in their thinking. We're always thinking about the food and the people we're serving and whether we're on TV or not, you know, certainly the TV brought a lot of new issues that, you know, aren't inherent necessarily in the restaurant business today.

15:09Although a lot of it, a lot of it is duplicated by social media. So like being on and being in the spotlight all the time is certainly duplicated by social media because everything is now posted on social media. You know, sort of changed everything and nothing is, I know, a terrible answer, but kind of true. Because if you're a person who cooks every day for a living, it never really changes. We love to do that. Whether you know that I'm doing it or not doing it, if I'm doing it quietly and it's a pop-up somewhere as a consultant or writing a book, that's what we live to do and love to do. the cameras obviously were a physical distraction and provided lots of physical challenges we had to work around the crews and work around the people pre-top chef, pre-master chef, pre-all that because this was a real restaurant that was operating in New York City, it wasn't a set which was the mistake yeah, it was the mistake of the show the next five shows were all set literally hasn't really been done since having a real long form show Oh, I know.

16:14So Rocco's on 22, is that a good restaurant? Was that a good restaurant? Was it a good restaurant? Yeah. Yeah, I think it was a great restaurant. It was a serious restaurant built to be a restaurant. It was a restaurant prior to the show, restaurant that I'd been working on. The build-out and the opening got accelerated due to the programming needs. But yeah, it was, I thought, a love letter to Italian-American cooking pre-Carbonne. It was sort of what Carbonne did 10 years earlier. Yeah, I mean, I asked that and knowing the answer, because obviously you have standards and you weren't going to put up bad food.

16:49But then the reality and the drama happens and you have to separate from that restaurant at some point. And what's that like when you have to leave this restaurant that you found it and the drama is captured on television? uh definitely interesting times you know lots of confusion about what to do next and how to handle yourself during that transition uh but you know something you learn to live through at that at that point in my career i was so young i i you know wasn't necessarily prepared yeah you're young experience yeah uh i think now any chef of my age or who's been through a few restaurants understands that opening and closing restaurants is part of the business.

17:27Yeah. So I don't think it feels as serious. Like a death thing. It makes not feel the same way. But yeah, it was super interesting. I remember feeling very occupied with it at the time. And now when I think back, it's just another restaurant. It just was another restaurant. You know, yeah. And so you were at the Standard Grill for like a minute. I don't want to get into that. But then you haven't really had a restaurant in New York since then, right? No. No, I haven't had a restaurant. I've consulted and done pop-ups, but nothing of my own. I was at the Standard for a little more than a minute.

18:00We kept it very quiet for a long time and real proud of what we did there. Thank you for coming correct with that because I wasn't trying to diminish it. Because honestly, when you joined the Standard, Katkin's been wrote this great piece in Food & Wine that I revisited. I think I'm going to link to that. It's a great piece about you and you being there. And there was like general excitement and enthusiasm for you cooking again in New York, and you did keep it quiet. So I think the optics were that it was a short-lived thing, but obviously it's untrue. Let me ask you, I mean, that food, I didn't dine there, but I wanted to try your restaurant food.

18:32I'm just being selfish here. Because what I read and what I knew, but are you going to enter the kitchen again? Yeah, I mean, that food turned out well in spite of all the challenges that come with running a hotel. Hotels. With seven food and beverage outlets and two nightclubs. I was able to reassemble some of my team from Union Pacific, believe it or not the chef, Dan Perilla Chino, lovingly referred to as Chino who is the chef of Quality Bistro now who worked with me at Union Pacific, was able to run that team and lead it and really duplicate a lot of the standards that we, you know, he and I loved from back in the day so very proud of that food we did a lot of focusing on ingredients and building out beautiful dishes from the best ingredients.

19:20Yeah. Which is what I think the hotel needed. Yeah, but the Boom Boom Room, food and bed was not probably your favorite thing to do because it's a club, right? We did great food at the Boom Boom Room. I mean, I can't deny that. They wanted and I wanted, and the owner who lives in Hong Kong, this billionaire from Hong Kong, wanted great food in the Boom Boom Room. And so that was a great menu. I was very proud of that menu. Yeah, what's on the menu? What's happening at Boom Boom? when we were there. We had amazing dumplings. We had foie gras. We had, you know, we had jamon iberico. We had good stuff.

19:53Yeah. Caviar, you know, good stuff. Great things to pop with the crew. Kind of stuff that you want to have when you're, you know, drinking and out late. Late night overlooking downtown. Japanese, Korean style fried chicken, karaje. Oh, right on. I like that. So, I mean, let me ask you. I mean, do you want to open in New York at some point? You know, I am unfortunately stuck with this business and it's stuck with me. So we're, you know, locked into each other at this point. So, yeah, I mean, I love the city. I love living here. I love working here. I still believe in the magic of New York, and I think New York more than ever needs magical food.

20:28So, yeah, yeah. I'd love to see it. I'd love to see you. What would the concept be just generally that you would want to open? I go from 10-person counter concept to, you know, big place with, you know, eight pizza ovens. I'm not sure. Yeah. It's sort of in New York, you got to build around the space. I agree. And that's what a veteran would say is the first answer. And it's what the deal is, what the real estate deal. Exactly. Food costs are. But do you look at the idea of food costs right now? And does that feel a little intimidating? Because it's kind of crazy, this adjustment in cost structure in restaurants and the way diners now have to realize it's$150 a person to go to dine at a nice restaurant now, not$48 anymore.

21:10Well, one thing that's a positive outcome of the crazy increase in costs is that people are very well aware of it now. So they don't always think, oh, the restaurant's gouging us. They know now that things are so expensive and that when restaurants add a 3 % this fee and a ribbon-cutting fee and a culinary fee, they're really just trying to survive because it's so hard to stay open. So that is a positive thing. I do hope that food costs could come down at some point because it really limits what you can do, which is why you're seeing a lot of New York perma menus. I don't know if you noticed, but everyone has the same menu these days.

21:51Yeah. There's the fancy burger and the tuna tartare. Burgers can be$33, and that's fine. People are down because it's cheaper than most things. Right. It's not$60 for roast chicken. Exactly. Roast chicken is like$58. Yeah. And when you talk about these costs, it used to be$40 a person for nice dining. but let's let's let's move on to qvc because what i really appreciate is your early pivot to qvc and actually working in in that kind of arena you clearly embraced it early on in your career why yeah you're great no i mean it was i hope you take this right i mean great opportunity to you know sell cookbooks first which is which is what happened first i think they brought me on for a cookbook yeah we we brought me on for flavor and we sold you know i think 10 000 copies and everyone was blown away um and then uh we met someone who was able to duplicate my mom's meatballs and we were able to sell those and yeah it was it was pretty cool yeah cool yeah and they were um they were able to get uh you know into factories and access to products that no one had heard about yet and they were able to be experimental because of their buying power so So it was very cool, yeah.

23:00Yeah, and you still do it a little bit now? No, I don't do it. You don't do it anymore? But I remember it just was a cool thing to see a chef on QVC and actually doing the work and offering cool products. It was like that. Let me ask you a little bit about Everyday Delicious, your new book. How does this evolve in terms of your cookbook writing? You've written several books. This new book, how does it progress? Well, what I feel is a natural progression for me, especially coming out of the pandemic, as you mentioned earlier, March 2020 is when my last book came out, Keto Comfort Diet, my ninth book in a series of health and wellness books.

23:37And then, of course, pandemic comes and I'm home, not in professional kitchens. I just left the standard cooking every day for friends and family and realized how important it is to just focus on the basics, getting something delicious on the table quickly with ingredients. At that time, Some were hard to find. Some, you know, we couldn't get toilet paper at that time. But, you know, so there's a lot of focus on pantry, what's in your pantry. But it sort of just renewed the sense of joy that I get cooking at home for family. And when you're doing it for months and months and months on end, you know, you really have to dig deep a little bit into your culinary bag of tricks to figure out what can be exciting today and what will make the family feel good today.

24:17So I was just hoping to, I mean, it's a pivot from the health and wellness. Yeah. And Diana and I decided to not do another keto book precisely because we feel like everyone had gone through this experience with us, of course, and would love to know what a pro chef would do when suddenly confronted with cooking at home every day. Yeah. And was it a big adjustment for you? I mean, you just left this big restaurant job. Well, cooking is cooking is cooking. Sure. And we love cooking. and if you're a lifelong culinary and like I am and like so many of the colleagues that you mentioned earlier we love cooking whether it's home or in a pro kitchen.