Chef Chris Cosentino Coming to Newport (and Back Home to RI)
Friday, September 17, 2010
My conversation with Chef Chris Cosentino could best be described with the phrase: it’s the journey, not the destination. Over the course of thirty minutes we touched on what seemed like a hundred different topics including his admitted ADD/ADHD, growing up in Rhode Island and returning for the Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival and, of course, offal. Google “American offal” and two of the top ten links lead to Cosentino. That’s something Cosentino wanted to clear up right away.
“Perception vs. reality” he repeated to me a few times. The perception is all Cosentino does is prepare offal, the internal organs and entrails of an animal, but that’s not his reality. He grabbed the menu for Incanto, the San Francisco restaurant where he is Executive Chef, and counted for me: five dishes containing offal out of twenty-five menu items. Cosentino has been preparing offal for so long, becoming so accomplished at it, because he is a “firm believer we shouldn’t throw things away.” But while he said he “celebrates the history and techniques behind cooking these dishes, offal is a minor part of what he does.”
I countered that it’s a good story to talk about offal preparation because it seems like an uphill battle to get Americans to eat it. There are textures that millions of people around the world accept as common but people here are very wary of eating. Cosentino replied Americans are used to “crunchy, deep-fried garbage,” but that “jiggly bits are good.” To him it was another perception vs. reality. People are told offal isn’t good, but the reality is these aren’t foods to be afraid of, we eat similar things all the time. Cosentino makes a dish with tripe, clams, garlic and lemon basil and people eat it without a problem because “perfectly cooked tripe and clams have the same texture.”
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTWe switched topics to growing up in Portsmouth, RI and how that’s affected what he’s doing. Cosentino told me about digging for clams right by his home and picking apples in North Scituate. He had a big herb garden at home and would eat fish fresh from the boat, something that carries through to his being a big proponent of so-called oily fish today like bluefish. Cosentino listed bone-on sardines, mackerel and squid as some of his favorite things to cook. One Newport specialty food, created by Cosentino’s mother’s family the Eastons, is still being produced today at Boccalone, an artisan salumi business Cosentino co-founded. Cosentino has the original recipe for Easton’s Breakfast Sausage which was produced in Newport from 1860-1942 and is now available out of Oakland, California.
So while he was always surrounded with the basics for what he was going to do with the rest of his life, Cosentino said he wasn’t a great student until he got to culinary school. There he read the one book Johnson & Wales faculty told him not to read, Marco Pierre White’s White Heat. Chef White’s 1990 book is often mentioned by many so-called misfit cooks as the read that told them it was all right to be who they were. Cosentino said that book “changed him the most,” it made him “hunker down” and realize he was “not alone.” Cosentino freely admits to being a dyslexic, ADD/ADHD kid and is now very proud to have a cookbook collection of around 1500 books and even reviews them, laughing as he described himself as “a guy who couldn’t pass English.”
I asked what Cosentino was preparing at the Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival and wasn’t surprised at all when he said he didn’t know what he was doing yet. “Maybe bluefish.” Cosentino said he was really looking forward to getting back to RI and seeing what was going on here. We ended on a somewhat philosophical note as I asked about his opinion on bigger food issues and how as a TV celebrity chef he affects opinions. Cosentino laughed and wanted to know how his job, working 16 hours a day in a kitchen, has somehow become perceived as ultra-glamorous. “I’m just another cook,” Cosentino said. “The moment a chef thinks he knows everything is the day he should pack up his knives.” Fortunately for those of us who appreciate what cooks like Cosentino do there’s “always something sparking and inspiring him.” He ended, “I’m not going to bend my beliefs. I’m really proud of what we do here, proud of guys we train.”
Make sure to catch Cosentino’s demonstration at the Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival in the Celebrity Chef Cooking Pavilion during the Grand Tasting at Marble House on Saturday, September 25th at 3:15 p.m. Find Incanto on the web here and Boccalone here. Cosentino’s site is www.offalchris.com and you can follow him on Twitter as @offalchris.
The 5th Annual Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival, September 24-26
