Summer Lovin’
A Mad Mentor, Pedigreed Pork, An Italian Bella by the Sea-Six Chefs Dish on the Unforgettable Seasons of their Lives.
By Daniel McCarthy
Photographs by Eric Levin
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Ken Oringer, chef/owner of Toro, Coppa, Clio, La Verdad, Uni and KO Prime
JUST BEFORE I proposed to
my wife, Celine, I went down
to her family’s beach house
on Long Island to cook for
her parents for the first time. I
knew the dinner was going to
be tricky. Her mother is from
Paris, and when you’re faced
with impressing anyone from
Paris with food—especially
a woman—it can be a little
intimidating.
I put together a menu
where I could be
creative while still
appealing to everybody—
whole grilled
European sea bass,
artichokes, a salad right from
the garden and a little coconut
tapioca with cream-cheese
sorbet for dessert. I enlisted
Celine to be my sous chef.
She’s always been very supportive
and enjoys cooking but
definitely likes to let the experts
do their thing.
SEXIEST FOOD:
“Anything you can eat with your hands. Especially sushi.” |
The whole night went
smoothly. I’m not sure what I
would have done if it hadn’t. I
realized at dinner that her dad
was really pushing the cocktails
on me. I didn’t know if he was
trying to get me a little buzzed
to find out what I was really like
or if he was just being generous,
but it was pretty funny. Since
then we’ve built a great relationship,
and I’ve even brought
him in as a sort of sous chef to
help me out at events I’ve done
in Europe, San Francisco,
all over. He’s great on the
grill and a hell of a lot
of fun. Maybe that’s
because he’s still a
generous mixmaster.
Dante de Magistris, co-owner/chef of
Il Casale and
Restaurant Dante
WHEN I WAS 20, I spent a summer cooking at
a place called Don Alfonso on the Amalfi Coast
in Italy. This is where I learned about hustle in
the kitchen—and the lure of Italian women on the
beach. One day, the chef said, “The weather is getting
nicer, so I’m going to start giving people the
afternoon off, one afternoon per week.”
Up until then I’d been working 16 hours a day,
six days a week, so when my afternoon off came
up, I left work and grabbed a bunch of young,
green lemons from the tree outside the restaurant.
I thought they’d go perfectly with the dusty bottle
of tequila I’d found in a local shop (no one in Italy
drinks tequila). Being a bit homesick, I decided to
make a jug of “Italian” margaritas using those lemons,
the tequila, limoncello and orange liqueur.
SEXIEST FOOD:
“If you put the scents
of passion fruit and
cucumber together,
it drives women
wild.” |
I drove down to nearby Sorrento on my
Vespa and just sat in the piazza, making
friends and sharing the jug of booze.
got so drunk that one of them
had to drive my Vespa back to
my place—with me miraculously
hanging on the back. Fifteen years
later I’m still friends with some of
people I met in that piazza.
The next morning, I hit the beach in
Positano, where I wound up meeting a local girl,
Federica; I dated her the rest of my trip. I worked
long hours all summer, but late at night, in bed,
I’d feed her food I made for her, and I’d get her to
taste the smoked sea salt I brought from home—
something she’d never had before—and dust it all
over her. Now, when I think of that summer, I can
still taste the mixture of Amalfi citrus and smoky
sea salt. The perfect Italian margarita.
Patricia Yeo, executive chef of Ginger Park
THE SUMMER AFTER I finished
graduate school at Princeton, I spent
about six months working a job I really
didn’t like. So I decided, along with two
Australian friends from school, to vacation
for the summer in England, where
I’d grown up. I was about 24 at the time
and hadn’t been back in ages, so it was
this really romantic trip for me, a special
time in my memory.
SEXIEST FOOD:
“A perfectly ripe fig.
Or ribs. There’s
something about having
dirty, sticky fi ngers
that you lick
clean.” |
 We stayed in Cambridge, at my godparents’
house, and just had a blast.
When we weren’t going off to eat and
drink at the local pubs (lots of fish and
chips, of course), we would just drive
around in a silver Renault, one of those
tiny European cars that looks like a sardine
can, rolling down the street with
the top rolled down. Most of the time we
were collectively lamenting how much
we really didn’t want to be doing what we were doing back home.
For the most part, we’d just go down to the Cam with bottles of cheap Champagne (it’s all
we could afford, being right out of grad school) and eat strawberries, get drunk, laugh and
really enjoy life.
I mean, I’m almost 50 now and still very much keep in touch with those two after our one
summer together, because even if you don’t speak to the kinds of friends who you have very
special connections with, it doesn’t take very long to reestablish
the thread. We’re not exactly as wild and crazy as
we were then (which is fine); however, one of them is
also in the restaurant business in Sydney, and we
got together down there about two years ago and
discussed the differences in the food scenes of
Sydney, New York and Boston.
These days, whenever I see Champagne
and strawberries, I’m reminded of that tipsy
summer of freedom in Cambridge.
Andy Husbands, chef/owner of Tremont 647
THE SUMMER AFTER my first year in culinary
school, I was hired at the Block Island
Broiler to work under an outrageous chef
named Don Hauser, whom I’ll never, ever
forget. I was 19 at the time and had only been
making salads up until then, but after attending
a career fair, Don hired me, saying, “You’re
gonna make salads still, but you’ll have the
opportunity to work on the hot line a little bit.”
Soon after I arrived, he fired a bunch of cooks
and said to me, “You’re going to work the line,
the grill, all of it.” I’d never worked a grill in my
life, but he said, “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you.”
I had no idea what I was getting into.
Don was scary: 6-foot-3, Bozo hair, reeked
of bourbon and vodka (which he’d drink all
night behind the line), had a fisherman father
who was lost at sea, and sometimes he’d bolt
out of the restaurant unexpectedly and not
come back until the next day. Total madman.
During service, if I did something wrong, he’d
walk right up to my face and say, “If you do
that again, I’m going to take you out back and
shove rocks up your ass.” This was the late ’80s,
so things were a little different.
I cried nightly.
SEXIEST FOOD:
“Pineapples—
anything that
juicy is
erotic.” |
But I learned so much: how to butcher fish,
process lobsters, work with stuff I never had
exposure to until then. He was my own Bobby
Knight, coaching and encouraging me, and
he’d calmly tell me after prepping together
all morning, “I’m going to go home, and
then I’m going to shower, and then I’m
going to drink about 10 espressos, and then
I’m going to come back and scream at
you. All. Night. Long.” But he pushed me to
be better. Even when Don was threatening
to shove rocks up my ass, what he was really
saying was, “Be prepared, be better. You need
to be set up; don’t leave the line.” He just had
a funny way of saying it.
I think he’d be proud of me now. I attribute
a lot of what I know and my love of
the restaurant industry to my experience
with him. It’s crazy, but I loved the guy. I
think about him every day. To this day,
I’ve never met anyone like him, and this
is coming from a guy who was on Hell’s
Kitchen. Chef Ramsay has nothing on Don
Hauser
.
Lydia Shire, co-owner/chef of Scampo of The Liberty Hotel, Locke-Ober and Towne
 IN THE SUMMER of 1971, I worked in this jazz
club on Boylston Street called Paul’s Mall/The
Jazz Workshop. I was 21, had three kids, was in
the process of a divorce and needed an extra job
besides the Brookline linen shop I worked in. So
I landed a job as a cocktail waitress in this very
cool club where over one summer I got to meet all
kinds of jazz legends—Jimmy Smith, Cannonball
Adderley, Ramsey Lewis and Miles Davis.
SEXIEST FOOD:
“On the patio of La
Colombe d’Or [in France] with
your lover enjoying a small
dish of Picholine and Niçoise
olives, drenched in a local
Provençal olive oil, with
a chilled bottle
of fresh rosé.” |
When you go through a separation, it’s easy
to get into a funk and start to feel like you’re not
attractive or desirable, so it was a great feeling to
show up in these tight white shirts and little black
skirts (which got shorter
and shorter, as one of owners constantly said, C’mon
Lydia, get that skirt up higher.”). I suddenly
started getting $10 tips for serving two drinks, just
for looking good. Really good. I mean, I was a
pretty hot babe back then. I got asked out by Lou
Rawls, hit on by Miles Davis and met the guy I
would date for the summer, Leroy Bryant.
Oh, he was tall, dark and very handsome. To
me, he was fresh meat! We would go out to dinners,
tooling around the city in his acid-green
Cadillac Eldorado convertible with white leather
seats and a white top. I haven’t seen him in years,
but I keep hoping one day he’ll show up at one of
my restaurants.
When the summer was ending, I realized I’d
had enough; I really didn’t want to cocktail waitress
anymore. I started calling Le Cordon Bleu
academy in London every single week until they
accepted me—finally saying, “Alright, just come”—
which got me on the path I’ve been on since.
But that summer, I was a hot number outside the
kitchen. And I learned to be fearless.
Jason Bond, executive chef of Beacon Hill Bistro
LAST SUMMER I embarked on a
mission to raise—and serve—a couple
of Mangalitsa pigs for the first
time anywhere in New England.
This breed is prized in Europe for its
meat because it’s lower in saturated
fat and higher in polyunsaturated fat
and antioxidants.
I’d bought pigs from farms for
years but had never been in a position
where I handled them myself,
so I had to learn the simple things—
like how to grab hold of a little
three-month-old, 40-pound piglet
running around and then get him
in the truck. This is surprisingly
tough. Bribery in the form of
apples helped.
SEXIEST FOOD:
“Anything local and
fresh, but also chocolate.
High-end chocolate
contains alkaloids,
which are mood
enhancers.” |
I named the brothers Black
and Tan for their coloring, andthey were
unique, funny
little animals.
It was interesting
to watch how their
different personalities
affected their physicality. The older
one, Tan, was the dominant alpha
one. He grew to about 325 pounds,
and all the other pigs on the farm
would trot after him, the leader
of the pack. Black was smaller;
he grew to about 250 pounds and
was a totally lazy guy, happy to
just lie under a tree. They lived a
beautiful life through the whole
summer; I learned a lot; and the
fantastic wine dinners we threw
with their meat ended the whole
project on a really high note. |
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