It’s in that last part-as good as you were-that I begin to sense just a hint of something else that motivates him.Īt lunch a few days later, I ask DiSpirito how he feels about the backward nature of his recent critical success. ![]() “I think in a long career, you probably need a couple of breaks in order to come back and be as good as you were,” DiSpirito says. Rocco presents a plate from Standard Grill. In 2004, the same year DiSpirito’s restaurants and reality show ended, his mother, Nicolina, had a heart attack. There was more going on in his life than what the world saw. Although my dancing may have killed some people who were watching.” He goes on: “And writing books and doing Dancing withthe Stars never killed anyone. “I didn’t have a set plan I just let the universe nudge me and respond to things that I like and don’t like and see where it takes me,” DiSpirito says. Trying to do it after having taken such a long hiatus to do things that many see as “selling out” is on another level altogether. Since leaving the restaurant industry, DiSpirito has written more than a dozen cookbooks, appeared on tons of cooking shows, performed questionably on Dancing with the Stars, and at no point cooked in a professional restaurant kitchen to make a living.īeing a chef and running a restaurant is stressful-I can tell you that from experience. He was even the subject of a reality television show called The Restaurant, which was canceled when Rocco’s closed. Of course, I realize now that even a few years in this business can seem like a lifetime of backbreaking work, but Rocco made it all look so easy.ĭiSpirito was born in Queens in 1966, started cooking professionally when he was a kid in the late ’70s, graduated from culinary school while he was still mostly a kid in 1986, cooked in a bunch of restaurants until he wasn’t really a kid anymore in the late ’80s and early ’90s, opened Union Pacific in 1997 and ran it for about six years before opening Rocco’s, a restaurant dedicated to his beloved mother’s cooking, in 2002, and then closing both in 2004. He was just 36 and good-looking, and he personified the youthful dream of a career: success without a lifetime of backbreaking work. I didn’t read restaurant reviews back then, but I knew he was critically adored. ![]() What he was doing was new, exciting, and too expensive for us to taste or understand. He wasn’t the most famous chef in the world (though he was well on his way), but he was the chef that all the young cooks wanted to be. In my younger and more vulnerable years, while I was at culinary school in 2002, Rocco DiSpirito and his restaurant Union Pacific were a very, very big deal. Rocco tames the flame at the Standard Grill in NYC.
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