If you’re both a foodie and a sucker for reality TV, you spend Wednesday nights glued to Top Chef Masters on Bravo. And you’ve probably been watching the original Top Chef season after season, through every clever triumph of fusion cuisine and each sickening failure of raw meat inadvertently served to a judge.
Meet your idols next week, when Top Chef: The Tour 3 kicks off right here in St. Louis. Season six’s Eli Kirshtein and season four’s Nikki Cascone will host live, interactive cooking shows at 10:30 a.m., noon and 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 14 at Soulard Market. (It’s sponsored by Charter Communications, L’École Culinaire and Favazza’s on the Hill). The fun includes restaurant-style table seating, a Quickfire Challenge for the public, face time with the stars, a Top Chef merch table and a photo op at the judges’ table.
We checked in with Kirshtein, who made his mark in season six by surviving for 12 of 14 episodes and impressing with his on-the-fly creativity, yen for unusual combinations and his spiky-hair-and-sideburns combo. Here’s his take on everything from his “techno-organic” style to working at NYC’s premiere kosher boite to chef groupies.
You’re currently the guest chef at NYC’s Solo, a kosher restaurant. How do you handle the limitations of that style? It doesn’t really faze me, it’s just a different style of cooking. You know, in Japanese cooking you don’t use butter, and in Mediterranean cooking you don’t use soy sauce. It’s just a different set of rules. Great food should be great food, and there’s no excuse for anything else.
What other projects are you working on now? The single most exciting project outside of my cooking projects that is I’m going to be featured in an issue of Spider-Man. My girlfriend is a comics person and one of the chief editors from Marvel hit me up on Twitter and it grew from there. My character will have the hair, the sideburns, the glasses, the smarminess, everything.
You call your style “techno-organic.” What does that mean? I feel like people use the word “molecular” a lot in reference to me, and I hate that term, it’s not accurate. There are probably only two guys who really do that. My goal is to find gorgeous, perfect, beautiful ingredients and join them with modern, contemporary techniques.
They really pressure the contestants on Top Chef. Your response to getting booted has been described as very emotional. We had been under an immense amount of stress for six weeks. I was emotionally and physically exhausted. I was upset. It was like a big, giant exhale.
Why are so many chefs heavily tattooed these days? I have one tattoo on my back I got when I was 18. I don’t think it’s the food industry. Walk into a hipster, transitional part of any town and you see people covered in tattoos. It’s the only fad I can think of that is permanent.
In season six, you had some serious disagreements with cheftestant Robin Leventhal. I have mixed feelings about it. I wish I had handled myself slightly differently, but at the end of the day, I don’t totally regret it. My take on her is the exact same now as it was then. Her outpouring to the media re-emphasizes the point that it doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 70 or however old she is, you can still be just as immature as anybody else.
What’s up with the sideburns? I had facial hair back in high school, but in culinary school they make you shave everything off. When I got out of culinary school I went with the sideburns instead of a full beard. I just wish I was in Motorhead circa 1978.
How do you get your hair to stand up like that? Murray’s Afro Wax. If anybody from Murray’s reads this article, I’d love to talk to them about being their official spokesman.
There are a number of videos of you cooking on YouTube in which you let loose with the four- and 12-letter cuss words like a hockey coach. The funny thing is that I feel like I have a very large vocabulary. It’s just a part of my vernacular at the end of the day.
Are there chef groupies out there? A few. I don’t think they’re quite as outlandish or intense as regular rock groupies. They’re just foodies who happen to know who you are.
– Byron Kerman
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2010.