Talking with My Mouth Full (14 page)

One of the emails Chris sent me that first week on the job read: “You’re going to Wisconsin October 22–25 for the Kohler
Food & Wine
Experience. Please mark it on your calendar.”

I’d been on two business trips in my life, once to Palm Beach for the opening of Café Boulud Palm Beach at the Brazilian Court Hotel, and once to Miami with the Café Boulud Palm Beach team to help at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Now, suddenly, I would be managing an event in an executive role?

It was less than one month away. Thankfully, before he left, Kevin had secured the chefs who would be appearing: Food Network’s Tyler Florence, Chef Dean Fearing from Dallas, a wine expert named Anthony Giglio, and a cheese expert named Laura Werlin. I just had to coordinate their appearances, our sponsorship of the event, all the travel and cooking seminar logistics, and the integration of our advertisers. No problem!

With Café Boulud Palm Beach at the 2004 South Beach Wine & Food Festival

(
Photo courtesy of Michael Katz
)

Various coworkers would be coming with me, including my boss, Chris, and our intimidating and much-respected publisher, with the most outstanding shoe collection I had ever seen, Julie McGowan. So would our editor in chief, Dana Cowin. Up until this point, I’d only ever met Dana in passing. When I was in South Beach with Café Boulud, I was plating desserts at a barbecue when Dana came up to our table. “Hi, Dana,” I said. “I’m Gail Simmons from Daniel.”

“I know!” she said, smiling. “We’ve met before.”

She thought I was introducing myself to her because I didn’t remember meeting her. Of course I remembered meeting her! I just assumed she would never remember meeting me. Although a slightly awkward reintroduction, I was overjoyed to learn she knew who I was.

I was also elated to spend the weekend in Kohler, stuffed with fried cheese curds and sausages, at a fancy hotel and spa. I’d been to festivals with Daniel, but seeing one from the operations side was a thrill. To my coworkers it was just another event, but to me it was a whole new kind of fun.

Late one night, we ended up with the chefs at the hotel bar. This was the beginning of a close friendship with Anthony, one of the most hilarious and accessible wine writers and educators on the planet, and Laura, the Queen of Cheese. I was hanging out with wine and cheese geeks! I loved them!

We were hungry, so Tyler ran into the kitchen and made bratwurst, apple, and grilled cheese sandwiches for us. Anthony was busting out bottles of Amarone, Barolo, and Barbaresco. We all lifted our wineglasses and I cheerfully toasted with what I’d said twenty times a day at Daniel: “Bon appétit!”

A hush fell.

Chris gave me a murderous look.

“We don’t really use that term at
Food & Wine
,” she whispered. “That’s our biggest competitor. Instead we say: ‘Enjoy your Food & Wine.’ ”

I promised myself I would never utter the phrase again.

Kevin, my predecessor at
Food & Wine
, had a background in both cooking and marketing. As part of his job he often represented the magazine to the media. When he left, a gap needed to be filled. Dana, our editor, couldn’t do all the television and press for the magazine on her own. They needed more people with solid culinary and public speaking skills, who would be comfortable in front of a camera.

I had been the press contact for Daniel, behind the scenes, so I was familiar with a lot of the players in food media and how public relations worked.
Food & Wine
knew I had culinary training, so they suggested I take on some of the media for the magazine.

They put me through a few intensive days of media training, and then I started doing little appearances here and there. I did a
Fox & Friends
segment and a bunch of short stories on the local station, New York 1. I was on CBS’s
The Early Show
. I would talk about “Best Wine Bargains,” or “What to Cook for Easter,” or “New Trends in Artisanal Ice Cream.”

After a good deal of trial and error, I learned how to talk and cook at the same time. A year into the job, I was finally getting the hang of things.

Then the New York head of the Classic in Aspen at the time, Elizabeth (Biz) Deppisch, went on maternity leave. It was just after the three-day event had finished, in July of 2005. She worked on it all year round with a staff of three in our offices, in conjunction with four others on the ground in Aspen.

Whenever people talked about the Classic, they sounded as if they were in a cult. They got a glassy look in their eyes. Aspen in the summer is a staggeringly beautiful place, but I did not realize how special or massive the event was until I was there in person.

Food & Wine
tents an entire soccer field in the center of town, leaving a courtyard in the middle. Close to three hundred stations are set up, where food, wine, travel, and other lifestyle brands create a gastronomic wonderland for consumers to taste and sample. When I had walked into the tented pavilion for the first time, just a month before, I was instantly amazed that it took only a year and a handful of full-time employees to assemble. The job was
enormous.

And the tents are only one aspect of the whole event. In addition, there are more than eighty pieces of culinary programming throughout the weekend, including cooking demonstrations by the country’s most accomplished chefs, from The Pleasures of Tuscany by Mario Batali to Paella Party with José Andrés, Secrets of the French Laundry with Thomas Keller, Giada De Laurentiis’s Giada’s Kitchen, and Bobby Flay’s Spicy Grilling Tips. You also can attend seminars on every grape varietal from Riesling to Malbec, on every spirit from absinthe to mescal, hosted by wine and cocktail authorities from coast to coast. There’s Pigs & Pinot with Danny Meyer and Dan Philips, Joshua Wesson’s Fizzalicious: Great Sparkling Wines, American Craft Beers with Ray Isle, and a once in a lifetime vertical tasting of cult Napa Cabernet Screaming Eagle. It’s all just waiting to be devoured, spread out across twenty-odd venues around the city center. There are celebrity chef photo opportunities for charity, cookbook signings, panel discussions, networking lunches, and pool parties. There are also events each evening for up to a thousand people where you eat, drink, and schmooze until the early hours.

The weekend culminates in my favorite event of all: the Classic Quickfire. In the early days of the Food Network, there was a show, hosted for most of its run by Sissy Biggers, called
Ready, Set, Cook
, which in some ways may have laid the groundwork for other competitive cooking shows, like
Top Chef.
It was the original food competition show.

Blueprint for the 2007
Food & Wine
Classic in Aspen Grand Tasting Tents

(
Courtesy of devINC
)

The concept was brilliantly simple: Two well-respected chefs went head-to-head on a kitchen set. They each got a mystery bag of ingredients and a sous-chef from the audience. They were only given twenty minutes and $10 worth of ingredients. Based on the dish’s creativity and presentation, the audience chose the winner.

Ready, Set, Cook
went off the air in 2001, but
Food & Wine
adopted the format for the Classic. For years we called it the Classic Cook-off. Sissy still hosts it. Two great chefs face off.

In recent years, the winner of
Top Chef
, who comes to the Classic as part of the show’s prize package, has become one of the chefs in the game, facing off against an iconic chef like Jacques Pépin, the godfather of everything, or against the winner of
Top Chef Masters
, which is why we now call it the Classic Quickfire. Picture Season 6 winner Michael Voltaggio, with his tattoos and his liquid nitrogen canister, cooking against culinary heavyweight Rick Bayless, the Season 1 winner of
Top Chef Masters
. Throw in a couple of early morning cocktails, a few mystery ingredients, and an audience studded with star chefs. Hilarity and mayhem ensue.

Often Tom Colicchio and I judge, along with Dana Cowin. We often auction off a judging or sous-chef spot to an audience member, with the proceeds benefiting KitchenAid’s Cook for the Cure and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Now food festivals all over the country often stage a cook-off in some shape or form. At the Cayman Cookout, presented by
Food & Wine
, I recently hosted one such event in which two amateur cooks, a lawyer and a teacher, competed for a trip to New York. Judging were Eric Ripert, Anthony Bourdain, José Andrés, Susur Lee, and the governor general of the Cayman Islands. No pressure!

They had to make an original dish in a short amount of time using local Caymanian ingredients. As it turned out, they both picked spiny lobsters. In most of the United States, we are used to Atlantic lobsters, which have smooth black shells that turn red when you boil them, and large claws. Spiny lobsters, also known as rock lobsters, are found in more tropical climates. They don’t have the big claws that Atlantic lobsters do, but they have bigger tails and a spiny exoskeleton.

One of the contestants had a terrible time killing his lobster. We were all looking on from the judges’ table in horror as he attacked the poor creature. He had it on its back and was hacking at it. The lobster slid all over his cutting board and kicked furiously. At one point it fell off the table.

To be fair, even a seasoned chef would probably panic at the thought of having to kill a lobster in front of Eric Ripert, possibly the greatest seafood chef in the country, if not the world. But it made me think about what we owe the animals we butcher and how it must be done respectfully. I actually really enjoy butchering. I’ve always found it methodical and contemplative, sort of Zen-like. It sounds grotesque, but I love the feeling of a sharp knife cutting through flesh.

So, a brief time-out here for a quick public service announcement about how to properly kill a lobster: People usually just drop it headfirst into rapidly boiling water. But if you want to be sure it’s humanely killed before it hits the water, or if you want to remove the meat in order to cook it in parts, you need to kill the lobster first, preferably with a sharp, heavy chef’s knife.

Hold the lobster stomach side down, flat against your cutting board. Plunge the tip of your knife deep into the back of its neck, right at the point at which the head connects to the body, and very quickly cut its head in half vertically, straight down the middle, right between its eyes. This is the fastest, most humane way to do the deed. Thank you.

Okay, back to the Classic. There is so much about the town of Aspen that’s unique. The climate is so dry and the altitude is so high that alcohol affects you more easily. On the flip side, your hair always looks fantastic. Those were my first lessons in Aspen, and they sort of became my mantra. If all else fails, if the shit hits the fan, it’s okay: your hair will always look great.

At the end of her maternity leave that fall, Biz told Chris she wasn’t returning to
Food & Wine
. Chris and Frances called me into Chris’s office one day and asked if I would consider the position. It would be a serious promotion. I would manage a large team and be the daily lead on the New York side for every aspect of the event, directing sponsors, handling programming, doing all the venue logistics and registration.

This was around the same time I interviewed to be a judge on
Top Chef
(much more on that later, of course). At the end of September 2005, within one week, I learned I had gotten the
Top Chef
job
and
the job of managing the Classic in Aspen.

It all seemed doable. We never anticipated that
Top Chef
would have the life that it has. Shooting the show would be a quick, three-week gig. The first season was shot in the fall of 2005, at the quietest time of the year for Classic planning, so I could go to San Francisco to shoot the show for Bravo, then come back and take over the event. I was simultaneously managing a few other events and projects for the magazine, but from February to June, I would focus exclusively on Aspen.