A Celebration of Chefs and Others

VICTORY!  SUCCES FACILE!  VITTORIA TOTALE!

Oh those personal chefs of Palm Beach – those white jacketed, croc-shod, Bluetooth-eared, clubby bunch that troll the aisles of our local supermarket! Is it simple envy that knowing they wield a knife better than I that has made me feel less than human as I wheel my cart past them? Probably. But, today there was victory!  Today, There was Deliverance! Equality – nay – Superiority! (They don’t have to know I usually cut my finger when I cut a bagel – and you don’t have to tell them!)

I am shopping for an intimate Moules Provençale dinner, and I am in a snit trying to find the shallots.  I humbly ask one of “them” if he knew where they stocked the shallots.  After a delicious amount of time wasted as he poked about the onions and garlic, we simultaneously found them among the potatoes.  “Thank you.”

Later he sought me out.  “I noticed you were buying shallots.  You must be a serious cook.”  (Excuse me, that is all it takes for a woman to appear ‘serious’ in Palm Beach!)

Jody Adams is a James Beard Award-winning chef and the owner of the renowned restaurant Rialto, located in Cambridge, MA.

What was your favorite childhood food? Was it something your family made and if so do you still make it?

Semolina gnocchi, no contest.  My mother made it for dinner parties with braised short ribs of beef.   My sisters and I fought over the crusty edges that were left behind.  I make semolina gnocchi for my kids and now they fight over the pan. 

It's springtime and we love to do "in season" pieces.  Would you tell us two or three ingredients fresh in the farmer's market in the spring that would inspire a Sunday dinner for you.

You have spring farmer's markets?  Lucky you.  In New England they don’t really kick off until it’s almost summer, but spring greens, radishes, turnips and rhubarb are showing up at Whole Foods and a few CSA's and co-ops.  I like keeping prep, cooking and cleanup simple on Sundays.  Weather permitting, the easiest solution is to get out the grill. Last week my husband rubbed half a butterflied leg of lamb with garlic, rosemary and olive oil, let it sit overnight in the fridge, then grilled it the next day.  A whole fish like branzino or mackerel would have also been a good choice; both were in seafood markets last week.  To go with the lamb I made a salad of thinly-sliced radishes and turnips, pole beans and greens tossed with a smoked bacon vinaigrette.  For dessert we had a homemade rhubarb crostada. 

I’d just finished writing my memoir Siren's Feast, An Edible Odyssey, a coming of age tale filled with recipes from my Armenian youth, my vegetarian restaurant on the island of Ibiza and various exotic locales I’d spent time in. 

When I first told people I had written an autobiographical cookbook, they offered perplexed looks.    

“A what?” was the usual response.

An editor at a large publishing house told me my combination autobiography/cookbook was not feasible for a large bookstore display.    

“Where would it be placed?” she asked.  “In the cookbook section?  With the travel writing?  The biographies?”

“Put it everywhere,” I told her.  “People will figure it out.”

At first glance, the Hollywood restaurant Kate Mantilini's seems an unusual backdrop for life-sized pictures of Mad Men, a show set in 1960s New York. That is, until owner Marilyn Lewis provides the back story. 

Q: What's the history behind Kate Mantilini's and why did you put up the Mad Men display.

A: It's been 21 years since we opened Kate Mantilini's, which I named after my Uncle Rob's mistress. My mother wouldn't let me speak to her, nobody would allow us to mention her name, but she was a very strong woman and I wanted to name my restaurant after her. My husband was under contract with Warner Brothers, and he did 50 films in the 1940s before we went into the restaurant business.

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