At the turn of the century, the television executives of America made a discovery: People would do literally anything to be on television, and they would do it for free. Where with actors there were considerations like union rules and human rights, ordinary people were only too happy to be marooned on a desert island, locked in a house with total strangers, or compete to be a trophy wife — Survivor, Big Brother, and Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? all launched in the year 2000. The more dehumanizing the concept, it seemed, the higher the ratings. So it was only a matter of time before the executives decided to set one of these reality shows in a New York City restaurant.
Around the same time, the best young chef in New York was a man named Rocco DiSpirito; he was tall and beautiful, and his food was exquisitely refined, French with an Asian accent. In 1998, Ruth Reichl’s New York Times review of Union Pacific, where DiSpirito was the executive chef, began with an image of the woman at the table next to her moaning in ecstasy, and ended with three stars. Two years later, Gourmet, which rarely put chefs on the cover, put the 34-year-old DiSpirito on the cover. So when NBC decided to make a restaurant reality show, DiSpirito was a natural fit. “I knew he was the guy,” says Ben Silverman, the show’s co-creator.
Thus were born a pair of conjoined twins no surgeon could sever: Rocco’s on 22nd Street, the restaurant, and The Restaurant, the show. Both began in fanfare and ended in ignominy. In April 2003, DiSpirito announced an open call for staff while standing next to Al Roker on the Today show, and the next day, the line to apply for a job stretched around the corner of 22nd Street. This event would appear in the premiere episode of The Restaurant, which debuted on July 20, 2003. Its final episode aired less than a year later, on June 5, 2004. Almost two months after that, following a prolonged war with Rocco’s co-owner Jeffrey Chodorow (which forms the entire plot of the second season), DiSpirito was barred by the New York State Supreme Court from entering the premises of the restaurant that still bore his name. He’d be fired from Union Pacific two months later. Finally, Rocco’s on 22nd Street shut its doors for good in September 2004, away from the prying eyes of the cameras. Plans to expand Rocco’s into other states evaporated.
DiSpirito’s post-show trajectory is familiar: He went into the wilderness of television, racking up 92 credits as “Himself” on IMDb. He hawked frozen Bertolli dinners and cookware on QVC, wrote successful cookbooks, and did the occasional private dinner. He made it through the foxtrot and Viennese waltz on Dancing with the Stars. He was well-known, but within the industry, his name was synonymous with wasted potential: In 2007, writer Michael Ruhlman and the late Anthony Bourdain created a Golden Clog award called the “Rocco” to commemorate the “Worst Career Move by a Talented Chef.” A year later, Jeff Gordinier would write in the New York Times that “the word ‘sad’ seems to surface a lot when you bring up Mr. DiSpirito’s curious career arc.”
And then, in late 2018, the Standard Hotel in New York’s Meatpacking District announced that it had hired DiSpirito to run the kitchen at its revamped Grill — not as a consulting chef who conceives a menu and leaves his crew to work out the details, but as a fully vested-and-toqued executive chef. Reviews ranged from lukewarm to spirited: “Rocco’s latest gig turns out, somewhat astonishingly,” New York’s Adam Platt wrote, “to be the opposite of a train wreck.”
But just two weeks ago, the Standard Grill announced that the chef was out after less than a year on the job, with a representative telling Page Six that DiSpirito and the Standard were “parting ways mutually and amicably.” A story published in Food & Wine days after that did not shed light on the split, but its final graf teased that it’s not the end of the comeback: “DiSpirito isn’t walking away from the industry,” Kat Kinsman wrote. “Not this time.”
Silverman puts it succinctly, “The myth of Icarus is very central to Rocco’s journey.” So as the restaurant industry, ever-hungry for gossip, chews over DiSpirito’s latest story of nearing the sun and plummeting to earth, the question seems more relevant than ever: Just what did The Restaurant do to Rocco DiSpirito?
In 2003, there were two kinds of food television: the kind in which Julia Child or Emeril Lagasse stood behind a massive kitchen island and explained how to make chicken a la king, and the gastro-tourist kind, like Bourdain’s first show, A Cook’s Tour. There was no Top Chef, no Chopped, no Kitchen Nightmares; Iron Chef America wouldn’t premiere until 2004. The Restaurant was America’s first food-oriented reality show, and it’s striking now for everything that isn’t there. There are no confessionals where castmates talk to the camera in the present tense. There’s no food porn, with beautifully plated entrees slowly rotating on a white background, and there are no storylines surrounding burned garlic or gritty polenta. In fact, no one even imagined food could be dramatic, so on The Restaurant, food is basically an afterthought.
Instead, the show presents a business devolving into farce. DiSpirito (and Chodorow, the Mark Cuban of New York restaurant moguls) is served with two lawsuits, one regarding the restaurant’s name, the other its location. DiSpirito often wears a yellow trucker hat with his name on it. Staff training devolves into DiSpirito playing a drinking game with servers, and ends with one of the more desperate-to-be-on-TV servers drinking an entire bucket of spit-back wine. The restaurant opens (after having been built in just five weeks), and during service, part of the kitchen bursts into flame, sending smoke billowing up into the dining room. Food takes hours to arrive on tables, and when it does, it is stone-cold; DiSpirito expediting in the kitchen is a truly frantic experience, an escalating arpeggio of the word “clams” screamed over and over. And that’s just the first two episodes.
“We all watched the first episode at the restaurant,” says Lonn Coward, a server on the show. “And afterwards I was like, ‘Guys, does our television show suck?’”
Uzay Tumer, floor captain and later a Rocco’s manager, was more succinct: “It was a complete disaster.”
“[The producers] did a lot to make the restaurant seem like a clusterfuck,” says Chodorow, who barely appears in the first season. (DiSpirito declined multiple interview requests for this article.) “I was upset about it, because people knew I was involved and I had friends who called me and said, ‘Jesus, that’s how you do a restaurant?’” Chodorow, who by 2003 was already a major player in the New York restaurant world, told me that he hadn’t wanted to be part of a reality show. But when DiSpirito approached him to put up the money for this new venture, Chodorow says he “liked the idea of a three-star chef who cooks very interesting food at Union Pacific [going] back to his roots to do an Italian-American restaurant with his mother.”
The Restaurant did well in the ratings, and as someone who worked in service for years, I found the show as enthralling as a demolition derby. But from the beginning, Rocco’s — the restaurant — suffered from a split personality. The basic problem was that Rocco’s was supposed to be a normal restaurant when the cameras were off: The real money for Chodorow and DiSpirito wasn’t in the show, it was in the business, and they put actual effort into making it work; Chodorow says he thought the concept could expand nationwide. But the space was fully built with television in mind. The producers concealed cameras in every pillar, the dining room was a “shitshow” for sound, and with the kitchen in the basement, physically moving food was a nightmare. With the benefit of hindsight, Chodorow now calls the Rocco’s location a “restaurant killer.” And then there was the hiring.
While the opening episode shows the line to apply for jobs stretching around the block, there were actually two lines. Carrie Keranen, who was a server in both seasons, says, “there was the reality show line and the ‘legit’ line.” The experienced professionals went straight to meet with Laurent Saillard, the restaurant’s general manager. The ones who just wanted to be on TV, she says, ran through a “gauntlet” of producers before meeting Saillard.
But even the experienced professionals, says showrunner Jamie Bruce, had been pre-vetted by producers. “We had 40 to 50 people we liked, and [when we did the open call], those people showed up,” he says. “I didn’t think I could force them on Rocco — so I did everything I could to get him to choose them, without making him choose them. And we got some of the people we wanted.”
The effect, however, was exactly what Bruce — who’s also worked on seasons of Survivor and Restaurant Startup — and his boss, Mark Burnett, who had made his name creating Survivor and turning it into a ratings juggernaut of backstabbing and human frailty, had wanted. “They put professionals with amateurs and put them on TV,” Tumer says. “Even professionals started behaving unprofessionally, myself included. It was a total mess.”
“I was definitely told by the producers that the reason the reality side approved me was because they were hoping I’d hook up with someone,” says Keranen, who did indeed wind up having a relationship on the show. The producers would promise staff that they’d planned epic story arcs around them — some got love stories, others were going to climb the professional ladder — but one after another, the plotlines all fizzled out.
Most of the staff were more intent on doing their actual jobs than mugging for the camera, because NBC wasn’t paying them a dime. The only person who was paid to be on The Restaurant was DiSpirito himself; Chodorow, despite being a full co-star on Season 2, says he was not paid. Tumer and Keranen tried to negotiate for payment before the second season, to no avail. (Flash-forward 15 years, and the stars of Vanderpump Rules are clearing around $15,000 per episode.) Several Rocco’s staffers told me they’d made less money when the cameras were around, because their sections shrank to accommodate filming and they’d receive fewer tips.
Since a show like this had never been attempted before, producers came up with the idea of bringing in casted customers to ensure there would be ample story, in case the servers didn’t deliver the dramatic goods. The front of the restaurant was for regular diners. But there were two large tables in the back, fully wired for sound and set aside for people the producers would bring in. One episode features a little boy named Frankie who spews a stream of pickup lines at a waitress, and then hits on the three hostesses. DiSpirito warns him, “They come as a team, these three.”
“Really. Buy one, get two free?” says Frankie, who is 10. The viewer, presumably, is supposed to find this charming.
But there’s one scene on The Restaurant that encapsulates everything that was warped about it, and reality TV in general, in the early 2000s. In the sixth episode, one of the curated back tables is occupied by four African-American women who appear to be in their 40s, dressed to kill. Coward, the only featured black server on the show, waits on their table. Footage that aired shows the group groping and fondling Coward. “They were poking at my crotch, slapping my butt,” says Coward now. “I felt really uncomfortable.” Watching it, the discomfort (and potential harassment complaint) is obvious, but the scene is played for laughs by the producers. The women unbutton his shirt, stroke his face, pinch his nipples. They almost lick him.
“You need to sit on my lap,” says one.
“I was trying not to embarrass them,” Coward remembers. “I sped them through the meal. I felt like a prostitute. [The producers] gave me that table on purpose.”
Other staff members confirmed this. “They were brought in to attack Lonn,” Tumer says. Saillard agrees. “I have no doubt that the producers were responsible for sending him ... to the table,” he says. Bruce disputes the characterization that the women were brought in to cause drama with Coward, and is firm that had Coward spoken to him, another server would have handled the table. Coward says that he repeatedly asked his manager, Saillard, off camera, “to take me away and give the table to someone else, but he said, ‘Just get them to dessert and Rocco will take over.’ So I did their desserts and walked away.” Saillard does not dispute Coward’s account. But regardless, it was Bruce and his team who chose to broadcast what came next: DiSpirito, as promised, takes over the table, and parks himself on one of the women. “You girls want something to squeeze?” he says. “You’re wasting your time with [Coward]. His girlfriend is a six-two boy with” — he gestures to his penis.
For that episode’s airing, Coward hosted a big watch party at his apartment. “I watched Rocco out me on national television,” he says. “It went really quiet at my house when he did that. Everyone was like, ‘That’s kind of messed up, man.’” Though Coward was out to friends and his co-workers, Coward had never mentioned his sexuality on camera, nor did producers know whether or not he was out at home. “My mom goes to church,” says Coward. “She lives in the South. If I had not been out, it would have been disastrous for me. They knew how I was in New York, but they had no idea how I was in Virginia. They really could have screwed things up for me.”
Not that there was anything Coward could have done about it. Fred Price, sommelier at Union Pacific and beverage director at Rocco’s, remembers being “given contracts to sign, 20 to 25 pages, and it basically said, ‘We the producers can do anything we want. We can embarrass you, humiliate you, do whatever.’”
To make sure there was as much embarrassing and humiliating material as possible, abundant use was made of reality TV’s best friend: alcohol. “We were hungover every day,” remembers Tumer. “We would shoot for six weeks and we would be drunk the entire time. The producers would take us out and say, ‘Open bar, drinks on us, go crazy!’ Then ask us very pointed questions.”
“We’d go out and tray after tray of shots would show up,” says Coward. “There was a lot of bad stuff.”
While there was no policy of inebriating cast members, Bruce concedes that it’s very possible that the young, ambitious associate producers who tailed the cast at night could have organized it themselves. “[The cast members] felt manipulated, which they were on some level, but they also participated wholeheartedly,” he says. Tumer agrees. “We were having fun and living in New York City and on TV. We were C-list celebrities for 15 seconds.”
It’s easy to think that everyone involved with that show knew what they were getting into. But in 2003, reality TV was still an unknown — even to the producers. “This was the early days of reality,” Bruce says. “We didn’t script shit and tell them, ‘Do this.’ This had never been done before ... In today’s world, everything would have been planned out.”
“We weren’t as savvy about reality TV as we are now,” Price says. This was a common theme among former Rocco’s staff: They thought they were going to be on a show about a restaurant. They didn’t entirely understand that they were going to be the show. The producers seemed to know nothing about restaurants, nor did they care. “I feel like everyone is in on the game now,” says Keranen, “but on this one, no one really understood the game.”
Least of all DiSpirito himself.
DiSpirito shot to fame on the subtlety and sophistication of his cooking at Union Pacific, but producers didn’t think scallops and sea urchin would set middle America on fire. “You couldn’t do a series unless the environment was accessible and relatable,” says Silverman. Instead, Rocco’s was conceived as an homage to the red-sauce Italian joint, centered around his mother Nicolina’s meatballs. “Mama,” 77 years old at the time, would be in the kitchen every day making those meatballs — hundreds of them. (I’ve made those meatballs. They are work.) DiSpirito himself was rarely in there. “I had to keep recycling footage to make it look like he was in the kitchen,” Bruce says. That absence caused real anger among the restaurant staff, especially the cooks, who thought they were going to be learning from a celebrated New York chef, not his mother.
Instead of in the kitchen, The Restaurant shows DiSpirito spending all night, every night, bathing in the adulation of his fans. In his recent interview with Kinsman in Food & Wine, DiSpirito talks about his lifelong struggles with anxiety, noting that in order to better perform the role of charming guests (with or without cameras), he worked with an acting coach to script interactions. The lessons proved effective, at least on the surface: He swans around pressing the flesh, often literally — he sticks his tongue in a woman’s ear, and she runs her hand under his shirt — in a blazer and collared shirt with the top few buttons undone. Women pinch and kiss his boyish cheeks, and he flirts relentlessly. He does this because he knows that the reason people want to come to Rocco’s is to see Rocco DiSpirito — not to eat his food.
He’s not wrong: The people who come to the restaurant (all of whom signed waivers at the door if they came while cameras were there) seem like they would eat him if they could, and one gets the feeling he’d gladly let them. DiSpirito described that tension to Kinsman: “How do you balance being the thing and promoting the thing that you are trying to be? You have to market more than master. In our industry, that tension is the source of many, many problems and Xanax prescriptions.”
Yet for viewers, DiSpirito became a reality TV trope, one which must have come as a shock to him: the villain. When one server fractures his arm, DiSpirito forbids him to work the door, even though he desperately needs to make money. “I’m sorry you have a broken arm and everything,” DiSpirito tells him, “but restaurants are supposed to uplift people, make them feel good — not remind them of life’s tragedies.” He calls one server a “fuckup” to a table that has gone unfed for two hours. To another irate table he jokes that to make it better “I fired two waiters.”
NBC showed no mercy to their newly minted reality star, either. Very quickly — around the first time the kitchen caught fire (it would happen again in Season 2) — the producers understood that they had a fiasco on their hands, and set about making sure they got one. “When there’s a train wreck,” Bruce says, “you follow the train wreck.” But what they never meant to do, Bruce says, is destroy the restaurant entirely.
Silverman, who had envisioned The Restaurant as a warm, friendly show (akin to the American version of The Office, which he executive-produced), speaks of this part bitterly. “The big mistake in hiring Mark Burnett’s team [from Survivor] was that I didn’t expect him to torture Rocco.” For instance, one night, a critic came in. DiSpirito made it clear that she was obviously to be given the VIP treatment, but producers decided it would be more compelling if the most incompetent waitress were to take the table. “[Rocco] wants his A-plus waiter there,” says Silverman, “and Mark and Jamie [Bruce] send in this dipshit.” Not only would this make for pass-the-popcorn television (indeed, the reviewer, Linda Stasi, is shown sitting stone-faced at DiSpirito’s jokes, and describes her food as “piping cold”), it would also be guaranteed to drive DiSpirito nuts.
Silverman is clear that Burnett’s actions fueled DiSpirito’s “giant mistrust of all the production team,” and “that mistrust fueled conflict between Rocco and Mark and Jamie.” Bruce rejects the word “torture,” but concedes that they would “throw wrenches” in the operation of the restaurant. “It wasn’t a restaurant,” he says. “It was a set.” (Burnett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
In the second season, DiSpirito became deeply suspicious of not just the producers but also Chodorow, who wound up becoming a focus of the show. The restaurant itself began losing serious money — over $600,000 in under a year — because even though it was packed, expenses were ludicrously high (to this day, Chodorow still has the offending numbers at his fingertips, like a $5,000 price tag for 2,000 business cards), and tables weren’t turning, because food took forever to exit the kitchen and everyone was waiting around to see the show’s star, who by that point was refusing to come out of his office. Chodorow is adamant that the restaurant could have been saved, but that DiSpirito refused to accept his help.
The second season mostly focuses on Chodorow’s very real efforts to gain control of the restaurant. Even this, though, was done on NBC’s schedule: Bruce told me that Chodorow actually wanted to start the takeover three weeks before shooting started. “I begged him to wait until the cameras were running,” said Bruce, and it worked.
“It was truly a nightmare,” Chodorow says. “It was actually worse than you saw on TV.” According to sworn affidavits from the 2004 lawsuit, when a manager displeased DiSpirito by refusing to send a busboy up to his office with a bottle of water, DiSpirito screamed, “If you set foot in my restaurant again, you are a fucking dead man ... I am going to fucking kill you.”
But the producers didn’t want the audience to fully turn on the show’s putative hero. “We were getting pressure from above saying, ‘Rocco cannot go down in flames,’” says Kate Hall, DiSpirito’s personal producer on Season 2, so she spent the whole second season trying to get DiSpirito to redeem himself in the kitchen. “We’d be like, ‘There’s a problem in the kitchen, can you go down there and see what’s going on, and we’ll cover it.’ And he’d go downstairs and take an onion and chop it beautifully, and throw it in a pan and toss in salt artfully, swirl it around the pan, and then turn to us and go, ‘How was that?’ Then he’d walk away again.’”
Even as Rocco’s on 22nd was hemorrhaging money, The Restaurant producers wanted a Season 3. After a judge barred DiSpirito from the premises, Bruce told me that he offered to rent the restaurant across the street, and let DiSpirito compete against Chodorow, his new nemesis. By that time, it was too late. “I told Rocco, you’re not a chef anymore, you’re a TV star, embrace it! Get to work! He looked at me like I was the devil ... this blank look,” Bruce says. “I knew at that moment I’d lost him for good.”
It’s hard to blame him. DiSpirito believed he was making something that would cement him as one of the new celebrity chefs that were being created almost out of thin air in 2003. But when the show aired, he was depicted as incompetent and distracted, and in the second season viewers were treated to a plunge into chaos, crying, and consultants. By the time DiSpirito’s doomed battle with Chodorow reaches its climax, the whole thing just feels forlorn. One of the last episodes ends with DiSpirito staring into the window of his own restaurant, tears in his eyes.
The Grill at the Standard is a brand-new space, but it has a lush old-New York feel to it, with wood paneling and low lighting. The servers are in white blazers, the runners wear vests, and the service is exquisite — attentive, swift, well-informed. It is also, I should note, remarkably expensive; a meal for two can shoot well past $250. DiSpirito, early on in his tenure there, still struggled with getting food out of the kitchen in a timely manner: As Eater NY critics Ryan Sutton and Robert Sietsema noted in their joint April 2019 review, they waited nearly an hour for a lackluster amuse-bouche to arrive, while VIP tables next to them “plowed through multiple dishes.”
Critics seemed surprised at the restaurant’s quality. In March, New York’s Platt gave the restaurant an 87/100 score, praising a shrimp-and-truffle risotto “which I’m still dreaming about days later.” In a two-star New York Times review in early April, Pete Wells suggested the chef was back in form, writing “Standard Grill is ... so much better than almost any restaurant serving a comparable menu of grilled meats and chilled seafood, that it’s foolish to wish for the return of the same Mr. DiSpirito who gave us Union Pacific.” Sutton and Sietsema were decidedly more mixed.
DiSpirito’s Peconic Bay scallops and uni is one of the dishes that made his name, and I can see why: When I visited the Standard in February, it was subtle and even challenging, commanding the diner to shut out noise and concentrate, hard, on the texture and flavor. Even more flooring, however, was the humble salad of wild lettuces and Italian chicories. It was winter, and we saw nothing we recognized as chicory. It didn’t matter. The salad was a loosely organized confederation of gaily colored lettuce leaves, and it was bang-your-head-against-the-table good.
Even though it was a Saturday night, DiSpirito was nowhere to be seen in the dining room, and our waiter confirmed that he was in the kitchen every day. As the meal went on, my dining companion — my father — and I ate a fregola somehow engineered from water chestnut and chickpea flour, which was sharp and clean and briny. My father was a restaurant architect for more than 30 years, and had worked closely with DiSpirito: He and his partner Larry Bogdanow designed Union Pacific, the restaurant that made DiSpirito’s name. My father is, to put it mildly, not a Rocco DiSpirito fan after working with him, but eating this salad, he began to soften. A strain of charity leached into his memories. Good food will do that to you. “Maybe this is where he should have been all along,” my father murmured.
For a moment, that was DiSpirito’s plan. At the end of the show’s run, when his failure is almost complete, DiSpirito and his mother talk about finding a new restaurant space. “A little place downtown, where the kitchen and the dining room are almost the same space,” he says, somewhere that he could have begun to redeem himself through his cooking — somewhere like the restaurant we were eating in that February night.
But why, then, did it take him 15 years? He told Grub Street in a January interview, vaguely, that “I didn’t feel like I had a meaningful contribution to add to the restaurant scene, until I realized that my contribution would be this.” To Kinsman, DiSpirito is more candid, saying that after his mother Nicolina’s heart attack in 2005 he reshuffled his priorities, and caring for her health took precedence. “I didn’t really think about what the costs were, what the trade-offs were,” he told Food & Wine. Nicolina DiSpirito died in 2013; two years after that, DiSpirito says he underwent an emergency surgery after years of neglecting his own health. “The emergency diskectomy — a kind of spinal surgery — for his acute sciatica was something DiSpirito had dreaded for his entire adult life, and it left him as an invalid for a time,” Kinsman writes.
Chodorow believes part of the delay was that “Rocco became very, very famous and successful very fast, and I think it overwhelmed him.” In a wide-ranging conversation, Chodorow went to great lengths to stress to me that after their legal battle ended, DiSpirito behaved ethically and responsibly, and that there is no ill will between them.
Lonn Coward took longer to forgive DiSpirito, but as the years have passed, he’s softened. “I’m almost certain that he looks back, and I wonder if he feels some kind of remorse,” he says. “I feel like ... he was scarred. If it was traumatic for me, it had to be traumatic for him. He was at his peak, and he let the fame take over. And that was sad to watch.” Like many I spoke to, Coward felt real sympathy for DiSpirito when Nicolina died.
Silverman, who considers DiSpirito a friend, says that DiSpirito has “evolved since the show ended. I’m glad he’s had the success that he’s had.” Bruce, for his part, is most mournful that the show itself has vanished from popular memory. He still considers it the best work he’s done. Moreover, he regrets that DiSpirito was never able to see the opportunity in front of him. “He could have been [Gordon] Ramsay,” Bruce says.
But by the time the show was coming to an end, to have reached the heights he’d achieved as a chef, DiSpirito had to love the grind, the mania, the hours, the hospitality. I imagine by the time he was barred from Rocco’s on 22nd (where his mother continued to work until it closed in 2004), that love was dead. After watching The Restaurant, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he never set foot in another restaurant again.
It is not a sin to want to be famous. In fact, for a chef, it is one of the more effective paths out of knee-grinding, low-paying work. Today, the industry is finally questioning how older non-celebrity chefs are supposed to be able to get out of the kitchen and successfully retire. To Price, who still considers DiSpirito a friend, DiSpirito’s only mistake was trying to do that in a new way. “I think he wanted to try [the show] to see what else was out there,” he says, “to see how else might a chef exist and practice his craft besides being in the kitchen of a restaurant 14 hours a day, six days a week.”
In a 2004 New York magazine interview that ran shortly before the show ended, DiSpirito contended with that question directly:
“I want to sell my books and products. Is there something wrong with selling out? Every chef is looking to cash in on his brand and notoriety. I don’t have a brand like Martha, but negative press certainly affects it. Sure, we got letters saying, ‘You were so mean on the show.’ It bothers me. I want to be loved just like everybody else, but people should judge my products on their merits and not figure out what is right for me. Put me next to any chef, any time, and I’ll be better than them. I can cook. Let’s say I am overexposed. Should I be judged poorly for it? Purism is boring. They say I want to be an actor. I’ve turned down modeling and acting jobs. Was it wrong for Da Vinci to want to sculpt after painting?”
It’s an arresting analogy — not only because of the swaggering comparison, but because only one surviving sculpture is attributable to Leonardo, maybe. Though he dedicated years to designing two gargantuan equestrian monuments, he insisted that the colossal horse had to be cast in one single bronze piece. But this was far beyond the technological capacity of 15th-century Milanese artisans, and despite his best efforts, the project ended in failure. The horses were never built. Genius has limits.
So maybe the analogy has some merit after all.
In The Restaurant’s fifth episode, there’s a scene where Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert comes in with Anthony Bourdain in what is one of the strangest, and somehow most affecting, moments in the whole show.
At this point, both men are just setting out on their roads to fame. Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential had come out three years earlier; his Food Network travel show A Cook’s Tour has aired but No Reservations won’t debut until 2005. Ripert has four stars from the Times, but his coronation by Michelin is still two years away. The cameras keep their distance, but we hear their conversation. Some dishes Bourdain pronounces “great”; others “utterly blow.” But mostly, they debate DiSpirito’s selling out.
Ripert is against it. “In my culture,” he says, “you do a great product, you don’t have to almost prostitute yourself.”
“I disagree,” says Bourdain. “The product is no longer enough. Look at Rocco, he knows.” The camera cuts to DiSpirito bantering with a woman, joking that “she’s making me an indecent proposal.”
Ripert ripostes, “As a chef, my first duty is to cook well.”
Bourdain is more sympathetic, even admiring the circus around him. “And you know what your second job is, and has always been going back to Escoffier, going back to the Romans? It’s to be a motherfucking hustler.”
They’re so totally out of place there, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suddenly summoned to Elsinore. And of course, they’re both right. Here are two men whose integrity would soon make them icons, set amid a scene of galloping tackiness. They are in this world, but not of it, somehow. I found myself wishing that they could have spent the whole series there, at a small two-top with a bottle of red wine, debating the proceedings like a Greek chorus.
And now, the punchline: The Restaurant was NBC’s first attempt to take a minor New York celebrity and turn him into a global icon; it wound up nearly ruining the man’s life. But one year later, Mark Burnett and Jamie Bruce tried again, with a different minor New York celebrity, on a new show. They called it The Apprentice.
Samuel Ashworth is a regular contributor to the Washington Post Magazine, and his fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Hazlitt, Longreads, NYLON, Barrelhouse, Catapult, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Rumpus. He is currently working on a novel about the life and death of a chef, told through his autopsy.
Fact-checked by Andrea López Cruzado
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