Tag: chefs

SHIFT LIST: Chef Victor Albisu Proves He Is Clinically Obsessed with Pearl Jam

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Listen carefully to the soundtrack playing in Del Campo — a South American-inspired steakhouse in Washington, D.C.’s Penn Quarter that Esquire named one of the best new restaurants of 2013 — and you’ll hear a Pearl Jam song every once in a while. That’s because they’ve been chef/owner Victor Albisu’s favorite band since he first heard their debut, Ten, in high school. He related to the Seattle quintet instantly. “Being a teenager is when everything is either the greatest or the worst,” he says. “It’s the time you feel the most. Pearl Jam, as a band, reflected those extremes. I also liked that they didn’t sound like anyone else. There was a little blues underneath their Seattle sound, along with the baritone of Eddie Vedder’s voice.”

It wasn’t until the Vs. tour on April 8, 1994 that Albisu had a chance to see the band live at the Patriot Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. It turned out to be a momentous evening beyond what he could have possibly imagined. As he was making his way to the venue, he began hearing a shocking rumor: Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain had been found dead of an apparent suicide. It seemed too impossible to be true, but when the Seattle fivesome took the stage, it was confirmed. “Eddie Vedder was crying through the whole show and was clearly affected by it,” Albisu says. “It was rough, but it firmed up this bond I had with Pearl Jam.”

Since that intense inaugural experience, the award-winning chef, who has cooked for Michelle Obama on multiple occasions, has seen the band 15 times. “You know you’re going to get everything they’ve got for as long as they’ve got when you see them live,” he says. “They give back to their fans.”

To take a break from helming the kitchen at Del Campo or one of his Taco Bamba taquerias in nearby Virginia — where you’ll also hear plenty of Pearl Jam playing — Albisu has gone to shows in D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Amsterdam — and he has a t-shirt from every one. In the Dutch city, he had the chance to meet bassist Jeff Ament at the Ziggo Dome in 2014. “It was a great experience for me,” he says. “I just talked to him. I didn’t ask him to sign anything; I’m not that guy.”

The best gig he may have seen was this past April at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center, when the band opened by playing Ten in its entirety to mark their 10th consecutive sold out concert at the venue. “It was the unicorn of shows,” says Albisu.

He was thinking about his favorite shows when he created this playlist. “It’s my ideal set list,” says the chef, who hopes to see the band when they play gigs in Chicago and Boston this August. “They do 32-33 song concerts, so this is in the realm of possibility. When I go to a Pearl Jam show, it’s a profound thing for me. This may be overstating it, but it’s like going to church.”

Photo credit: Rey Lopez

SHIFT LIST: Chef Carla Hall Likes a Little Rhythm in Her Blues

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Carla Hall had been on television a lot before she filmed the debut episode of The Chew, the food-focused daytime talk show she co-hosts on ABC alongside Mario Batali, Michael Symon, Clinton Kelly, and Daphne Oz. After all, she had been a finalist on Top Chef in 2008 and the fan favorite a few years later Top Chef: All-Stars, thanks to her indefatigable positivity, vibrant cooking, and cheery catchphrase — “Hootie hoo!” But reality TV hadn’t really prepared her for being filmed on stage in front of a live audience in the fall of 2011.

“I was so nervous on the first day,” she says.

Luckily for her, the DJ who was keeping the crowd entertained played something that struck a chord. (She doesn’t remember what, admitting, “I’m the worst when it comes to remembering people or their songs.”)

Whatever it was, it inspired her to run out into the crowd and begin dancing. A network executive, who was watching the scene unfold, ordered the crew to have a high-energy, Carla-specific playlist created. Now, it blares out of the speakers before almost every taping of the show. “It’s a way for me to connect with the audience, get out of my head, and loosen myself up,” says Hall, who put together this playlist to create a similar atmosphere.

Her gig at The Chew has given the Nashville-born chef a chance to hang out and cook with some of her favorite musicians, including Kimberly Schlapman of smooth-singing country quartet Little Big Town, Patti LaBelle, and Gladys Knight. “Food and music go hand in hand,” says Hall. “A lot of these guys spend a lot of time on the road, so they focus a lot on getting good food versus just having crap food from craft services.”

On this particular day, she’s prepping to tape a segment with Seal, where they’ll be cooking a blackened shrimp salad. “I’m so excited,” she says. “I can’t wait to meet him. There’s some music that reminds you of a certain time in your life. He reminds me of being in London when I was just beginning to get into food.”

Her mind is equally occupied with the upcoming debut of Carla Hall’s Southern Kitchen, which is set to open in Brooklyn, New York, in late April. Inspired by the cooking of her birthplace — she now divides her time between her home in D.C. and New York City, where The Chew is taped — the restaurant will specialize in Nashville hot chicken. “Because it’s a Nashville thing, there has to be country music,” she says. “It will range from bluegrass to country rock and country pop, as well as blues and R&B — some old; some new.”

It’s a far cry from what Hall listens to in the kitchen when she’s cooking. “I want something that’s really low-key, because I want to hear the food make sounds,” she says. “If I have something in the pan, I want to hear it sizzle. But if all the food is done and I’m plating up, that’s another story. Then the music becomes much more upbeat, as I shift into party mode.”

SHIFT LIST: Chef Amanda Cohen Reveals Her Dirt Candy Crushes

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Amanda Cohen may be a vegetarian chef, but she crafts the kind of comfort-focused, belly-orgasming food that has equal appeal for omnivores, stoners, and Saveur readers. At Dirt Candy, her award-winning restaurant on New York City’s Lower East Side, the visionary veghead serves dishes that proudly defy traditional meat-free cuisine, such as Korean fried broccoli — rightfully described on the menu as “crack in broccoli form” — and hot lava stone-charred Brussels sprouts accented with Yucatan style spices shoehorned into lettuce cups with toppings like smoked avocado and pickled jalapeño to create tasty tacos. (You can tackle some of her recipes by picking up her comic book cookbook. Yes, you read that correctly — Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant.) 

When it came time to create a soundtrack for her veg-centric eatery, Cohen had one goal. “I’ve wanted the restaurant to feel timeless and placeless,” she says. “You’re supposed to walk in and feel you’re on an island, in France or on a boat. You could be anywhere, anytime.”

To achieve that, the playlist is rich with globe-spanning world music, mostly of the happier, peppier variety. Cohen discovered many of the selections by listening to what New York cabbies were blasting, including tunes by Malian blues duo Amadou & Miriam and Argentinian ska band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. The playlist is equally inspiring for the staff in the kitchen. “There are times when the restaurant is really crazy and the music makes us go a little faster,” she says.

Personally, Cohen’s tastes veer back to the '80s. Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five” is a long-time favorite and she still holds a candle for some of the first singles she ever bought during the "Me Decade," including Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” (One of Cohen’s first concerts was the Material Girl world tour.)

Though she never had any muso crushes growing up — “No posters I kissed every day,” as she puts it — she has been overjoyed when some of her childhood favorites have dined at the restaurant. New Kids on the Block’s Jonathan Knight has been in. So has Boy George, who asked a clearly starstruck Cohen, “Do you want to take selfies together?” “Yes, yes I do,” she quickly replied.

 

A photo posted by Dirt Candy (@dirtcandynyc) on

Unlike some other chefs, Cohen has no secret musical past — perhaps fronting a riot grrl band or playing bass in a garage rock trio. “I’m the least musical person, though I love listening to it,” she says. “I have no rhythm and I cannot sing. Actually, I love to sing, but I’m terrible at it.”

However, at the end of a long shift at Dirt Candy, Cohen has no interest in belting out a song or listening to an album to unwind. She craves nothing but silence. “I want it to be as quiet as possible,” she says, “so I can go to bed and get ready for another day.”

Photo credit: Stephen Elledge

SHIFT LIST: Chef John Currence Shares the Soundtrack of his Rock ‘n’ Roll Life

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Long before John Currence won a James Beard Award for his forward-thinking Southern cooking at City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi, and earned the nickname the Big Bad Chef, he was pursuing a far more rock ‘n’ roll career. It all started when he attended a Beatles concert in New Orleans’ City Park in 1964. “Well, I was in utero, but technically I was there,” he clarifies. “I blame that for my lifelong fascination with music.”

As a kid, he devoured an impressively diverse swath of music –- from The White Album and Johnny’s Cash’s At San Quentin to Mozart and John Philip Sousa. When he fell hard for an artist, an album, or a song, he obsessed over it. “My brother and I listened to ‘Benny and the Jets’ over and over on a five-hour trip to the beach with my mom and dad,” he says. “The cassette player was smashed before the trip was over.”

Currence played drums in high school in New Orleans, but when he attended Hampden-Sydney College in central Virginia, he picked up the mic to front a band he and three friends dubbed Chapter Two. “It was the stupidest, most flaccid name,” he says. Their first gig was all covers, including Elvis Costello’s “Welcome to the Working Week,” “I’ll Be There” by the Spinners, the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” a punked-up version of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” and the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Friends urged them to write original material, which culminated in an indie record deal in the mid-'80s and endless touring. It turned into “six years of riding around the country in a broken down van and sleeping on pool tables,” says Currence.

The band relocated to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they wound up recording with legendary producer Mitch Easter, who had helmed R.E.M.’s earliest recordings. Easter’s relationship with the indie pioneers led to a surreal moment at one of Chapter Two’s own sessions. The band was at his house one day, trying to get a sound effect down on tape in his driveway, when a car pulled up. “We were in the middle of a take and we were like, ‘Who is this asshole?’” says Currence. “And then Mike Mills [of R.E.M.] gets out of the car, so our tune changed a bit.” The bassist stuck around and even helped with the session, creating a rhythm component for a song by hitting a baseball mitt with a ping-pong paddle.

Chapter Two ultimately released two now long-out-of-print albums, though copies sometimes pop up on eBay. During his time with the band, Currence worked a series of kitchen jobs. In the late '80s, his longtime friend, Larkin Selman, offered him a job as a sous chef at Gautreau’s, a restaurant he was opening back in their hometown of New Orleans. “I felt like, if I didn’t take it, I’d never leave Chapel Hill,” says Currence. From there, he helped opened Ralph Brennan’s Bacco before moving to Oxford, Mississippi, to make his own mark with City Grocery and its sister restaurants, including Big Bad Breakfast, Nacho Mama’s, and Bouré.

His musical past still echoes through his work. In his 2013 cookbook, Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey, he paired every recipe with a song. “I was always bothered by cookbooks that paired wine with the food,” he says. “Who is actually going to go out and find these esoteric wines to go along with cooking a dish? It seems stupid to me.”

When picking his Shift List playlist, he thought about the songs that hit him the hardest. “This is the soundtrack to my life, though it’s missing the Pixies and the Sex Pistols,” he says. “The best music is about honest life experience. It’s about heartbreak, vice, angst and agony. I’ve been through it all.”