Jamie Stachowski on Obsessive Chefs
Thirsty Bernie Sports Bar & Grill's Jamie Stachowski called this morning to add his two cents on my recent search for the area's most obsessive chefs. Stachowski himself garnered only a single vote in my survey, but personally, I think he was robbed. The dude's one intense toque. (See picture.)
Anyway, Stachowski was surprised that no one explained better why chefs are obsessive. He, for example, was always considered a "quiet boy" when growing up in Buffalo, N.Y. It's only when he got to the kitchen that he turned OCD.
"You can have energy and interest and passion and all that stuff, but when you apply it to the practice of cooking, you get obsessive," Stachowski says. Besides, he argues, kitchens are "chaos by design."
"We could have [the food] all cooked, done, and ready to go in the morning," he says. "It's by design that it's done at the last possible moment, so you get the best possible product."
"It's not like you hit enter" and you have a perfectly prepared meal, Stachowski says. "You got to check and recheck and recheck." Yep, sounds obsessive to me.
12:28 pm
Jamie is the master of chaos ... his mind spins that way. I watched him prepare a meal at the Beard House in NYC a few years back and most of the day I feared he would never get it together ... but he did and it was spectacular ... I remember sitting at a table that night with a local NYC doctor who comes often to the Beard House and she raved about Jamie's meal ... and then added, "The worst meal I ever had here was by some chef ... Jean-Louis Palladin." It's tough being a chef with so many fans and critics.