Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Phoebe Neidl: Hello, listeners. I'm Phoebe Neidl, an editor here at Audible. Today I am thrilled to be speaking with Tom Colicchio, the eight-time James Beard Award-winning chef and the head judge and executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning cooking competition Top Chef, which has been a hit on Bravo for 21 seasons and counting. Today we'll be talking about Tom's new memoir, . Welcome, Tom.
Tom Colicchio: Thank you.
PN: Glad to have you here. So, you've written some other books, of course, and I'd say they were more focused on recipes and techniques, and this is definitely your most personal book so far. It's really a coming-of-age about all of the experiences that shaped not only your approach to food but you as a human being. In the audiobook, you share that it took you 15 years to write this, or to get around to writing this. So, my first question is, why now? What made this finally the right time to tell your story?
TC: So, I did sign a contract for a book with Artisan. It was actually over 15 years ago now. Originally, I was going to do a sort of large-format coffee table book in the style of the French Laundry cookbook. It was based on a series of dinners that I was doing called Tom's Tuesday Dinner. They were 10-course meals, and I started working on that book, started working on the recipes, and quite frankly, they were just way too complicated. I didn’t write recipes down and we were constantly tinkering with the dishes as we were going along, and it just became impossible, so I scrapped that. And then at the time, my 15-year-old, who's now 32, I thought, “Well, maybe I'll do a book where I'm teaching him how to cook." Not to be a professional chef, but just to learn how to cook. We actually started working on it. He was home from school for the summer, and we were about a week or so into it and his girlfriend showed up, and that was the end of that [laughs].
So, then I decided, well, maybe a butchering book. And I dropped that idea very quickly. Then for the longest time, I just decided I had nothing really to say. And so the pandemic rolls around and I was doing a lot of Zoom cooking classes for corporate clients. It was 20 minutes of cooking and 40 minutes of Q&A. The question would always come around: When did you start cooking? Why do you cook? And I was kind of just giving a stock answer, you know, family, mother, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And I really started to think about it, and I kept going back to a few moments in my life, especially revolving around my grandfather.
There are a few things that I do to this day. I cook, I fish, I garden. And those are all things that I did—well, the gardening and fishing—with my grandfather. But then I thought about these touchpoints in life and thought, “Why do I really cook?” And I kept going back to when I used to fish with my grandfather. We would go mostly crabbing and clamming. Occasionally we'd catch fish. But we would catch so much that when we would come home, it was extended family and friends and it was a big meal. Iguess in the back of my mind, I realized that food brings people around a table and maybe that's why I cooked. And so I really started to explore that.In doing that, I thought, “Well, maybe it's time to write a memoir. Maybe it's time to put this all into perspective and try to really figure out why I do what I do.”
And then of course having grown up with ADHD, and it's probably severe at some points, and it was not diagnosed and certainly not addressed at all. So, I wanted to talk about how that affected me and how I found that once I got into a kitchen everything all started to make sense. It's also about growing into a man and looking at the various examples I had of manhood around me growing up and realizing that my father provided some example, but he had his issues as well. And I kept going back to my grandfather. He was more the person I guess I wanted to be. And having none of this really examined, and so, you know, it was time to write a memoir.
PN: I was grateful that you shared about having ADHD, because I was fascinated to learn that you don't really love writing recipes. You don't really love reading recipes. I think you said you don't even really love measuring ingredients.
TC: No. No. In fact, the first cookbook that I wrote, Think Like a Chef, we started working on the recipes, and I had a recipe tester, and the writer and I went out and bought a bunch of measuring stuff. We had to measure everything and I started cooking and I started measuring everything and it was terrible [laughs]. It was a noticeable problem, and so I was like, “I can't do this. I'm going to just cook and you're going to have to take notes.” And it worked out.
PN: But it made me think about how, if you didn't have ADHD, you might have thought differently. What were the challenges of it as a chef, but also what was the blessing of it? Did it fuel your creativity in some ways, that you were resistant to relying on recipes?
TC: Well, absolutely, it was an outlet for the creativity, but it wasn't even so much the cooking and the recipes, it was more the kitchen atmosphere. When they treat ADHD, they actually treat it with a stimulant, right? And so getting into a kitchen was just this amazing stimulant for me.There was so much action. There was so much going on. I talk about drug use in the book, too, and that was all part of it, that was my dopamine hit, the kitchen and the drugs and stuff like that. And so, again, knowing what I know about ADHD now, I mean, it made perfect sense, what I was attracted to. The kitchen, it was so fast-paced, I actually calmed down and I was able to focus and really threw everything into cooking.
"In the back of my mind, I realized that food brings people around a table and maybe that's why I cooked. And so I really started to explore that."
PN: You talked about your early food memories with your grandfather, which I loved, and those big family meals. And it got me thinking, because I'm a huge fan of Top Chef, and often it seems like the contestants make their best food when they're reaching to those deep food memories. Often it's a story of a grandparent or a parent taught them that dish. So, how do you understand that connection between food and memory and how those food memories become part of the tools or the arsenal for a chef, or how they impact a chef's work?
TC: Yeah. Also keep in mind that food memory isn't just from what we're eating. It's from what we're smelling, it's from the experience that we're having. I remember meals and remember actually more vividly who I was eating with versus what I was eating.We're all informed by how we grow up, in the environment that we grow, and our heritage, our culture. I think for years, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, when I started coming up, we learned French cooking. That was it. It was all French technique. And that's what we aspired to. If you were aspiring to haute cuisine, you cooked French food. Growing up Italian American, I'd never even considered cooking Italian food. And think about all the people, all the cooks going back 50 years ago when they started coming up, especially Hispanic cooks or African American cooks. They just denied their heritage and what their food was and just wanted to cook what they thought was going to get them sort of advanced in their career.
Luckily, that's all changed now, especially when you see chefs like Kwame Onwuachi, who's cooking food that he has a connection to and applying all the technique that he learned and applying that to his culture and his cuisine. It just creates something that's exceptional. It's not surprising that when someone's connecting their culture, their heritage, and their experience to a dish that they're making, it's better. There's more emotion, there's more feeling that goes into that dish. When you get out in the world and start cooking, it strikes a chord because people feel there's a connection there. It's not you're just cooking someone's recipes. You're cooking your own food.
I've always strived to do that. At a certain point, I said, “Well, I have all this experience learning French technique, but I'm still going to cook my food.” Going back to the Gramercy Tavern days, to me that was contemporary American, whatever that means. I mean, we're a melting pot, so you can use so much different influence. But it took me until about two years ago to do an Italian restaurant. Even though Craft, if you really look at it, was more in the style of Italian dining, not Italian food, but Italian dining where things are served family style and there's a real respect for ingredients. We all find our way, but I think now for a young chef, there is much more emphasis placed on doing your thing.
PN: Yeah, it made me think, because you've been in the industry for decades now, obviously, just how it's changed over that time. Do you think it's all for the better? Is there anything kind of from the earlier days in the restaurant industry that you think were better?
TC: The only thing I think that was better during the early days was the fact that we didn't have the internet. And so if you wanted to see someone's food, in France, Italy, Spain, wherever it was, Scandinavia, you had to get on a plane and go. You couldn't just go to your keyboard and make a few clicks. And so the problem with that now is that trends go around the world so quickly, because you see it immediately. I think because of that, people are influenced by trends much more than they were back then.
In terms of, you know, I've worked in some kitchens coming up that the chef wasn't in your face constantly and there was some support there. They weren't all brutal. But I think that having that part left behind, the idea that you were possibly threatened physically if you didn't perform, I'm glad that's all gone. I'm glad that our industry had its #MeToo comeuppance and I think it's a much better environment for women to work in, for minorities to work in. There's a whole lot of reasons why it's so good to leave that kitchen culture behind. But I think a lot of that had to do, if I look back on it, it had to do with just a lack of communication. Kitchens for a long time, especially go back to France, you started working in kitchens because you couldn't take the next step in your education, and so you had to learn a trade. So, dad took you to the local restaurateur and said, "Here." And the kid didn't want to be there, just got yelled at and screamed at. And that just became the norm. It's good to see that we're moving away from that and kitchens are more professionalized.
PN: So, you mentioned in there the importance of communication, which makes me think, you share a lot in the book about your relationship with your dad and how you absorbed his tendency of being, I think, sort of emotionally unavailable, if you feel like that's a fair way to put it. Although he was encouraging of your career in a lot of ways. But in recent years, it sounds like you really made a lot of headway in dealing with that. What would you say to other people, men in particular, who are struggling with communication in their relationships?
TC: Well, I mean, for me, my wife demanded it of me. She really did. We, like most couples, we had our issues and we worked through them. But we didn't work through them because I just sat there and stiffed on her and said, "No, it's your problem." I had to realize that I had issues I needed to work out. And we did couples therapy and worked through it. Again, I'll go back to examples that I had of what manhood was. And that was it. Even my grandfather, as much as we did things together, I don't think he was emotionally there for me. I mean, that was just the way men were. I thought that that's the way it should be. You know, I'm still working on it. But I don't know what advice I have. Listen, counseling is not a bad thing. It doesn't mean you're weak. It doesn't mean you're deficient somewhere. But it does help you become a better version of yourself.
PN: So, there's a lovely afterword for the audiobook that you recorded yourself, special for the audiobook. But the bulk of the book is narrated by the great Will Damron. What were you looking for in a narrator to tell your story? What made Will stand out for you?
TC: It's a good question. At this point in my life, I know what I'm not good at. When it comes to reading out loud, I'm terrible. My kids are 13 and 15 now. I have an older son as well. But my wife would read every night to them. Occasionally I'd get in bed and they were like, "Dad, you read." And I'd start reading and they would say, "Stop, Dad." [laughs].
I attribute it to, when I was young, my mother decided to get us a speed-reading device. So, when I read, I read very quickly and I skim over words. And if I try to actually read out loud, it's just bad. So, I did one session, because they kept saying, "It would be really great to have your voice." I said, "Listen, I know I'm terrible at this." So, I go into the studio, I did six hours or so. And when I was ready to leave, they said, "All right, we'll see you tomorrow." I said, "I doubt it. Listen, guys, you're being encouraging and that's great, but this is terrible. You know it is. Let's get somebody to do this."
"It's not surprising that when someone's connecting their culture, their heritage, and their experience to a dish that they're making, it's better."
And so they gave me just three examples. I don't know what I was looking for. It wasn't something that I was really thinking of. But they gave me three examples, and that was the one that I chose. There was one that I was like, "Absolutely not," and there were two that were close. But I just listened to it a few times, and not that it sounded like my voice at all, but it just sounded like something that I would listen to.
PN: Yeah, Will is great. You can't go wrong with him. He's definitely a favorite here at Audible. So, listeners should also know that you share a lot of great recipes in this book as well, which are included in a PDF that people can download along with the audiobook. I have to tell you, we made your grandfather's beet salad the other night, and I brought it to my mother-in-law's for dinner. It was delicious. But you are absolutely right that for some reason it tastes a lot better the next day.
TC: Oh, without a doubt, yeah.
PN: Yeah, it definitely needs to marinate. Can you tell listeners how you arrived at choosing and organizing the recipes for this book the way that you did?
TC: Organizing? I didn't organize them. I left that to my editor. I wanted to just stick them all in the back, and they were like, “No, you have to arrange them somehow.” I was like, “Then you deal with it.” In terms of choosing the recipes, some of the recipes, like my grandfather's beet salad, was something that we have every Christmas Eve and my entire family looks forward to it. So, there were some dishes in there that I wanted to put in that were family recipes that I tweaked over the years that we either do for Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve. There are other recipes that simply I would go shopping in a farmer's market, drop everything on the table, and start cooking. Again, for the person listening to this, these are not restaurant recipes. I purposely didn't want to do that. A lot of these recipes are things that I cook at home. Once the pandemic hit, I was home cooking, I was cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. It kind of got me through it, and some of the recipes were recipes that I do for my family. But there was no really rhyme or reason. It was just what I felt like cooking at the time and what I wanted to put out there.
PN: I look forward to trying some other ones in there for sure. So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a huge Top Chef fan. But I'm not a reality TV person in general. Top Chef is definitely the exception for me. And I think it's because for a long time now, the show has really avoided playing up the drama between contestants. The contestants are competing against each other, but they're sort of more fundamentally competing against themselves. And it's really gratifying to see the contestants grow over the season. Some of them really seem to make leaps and bounds. How intentionally did you foster that tone for the show?
TC: That's an interesting question. Early on, the producers pushed us to be a little more strict and mean, and it's not me. After a while I was like, "Guys, I'm not feeling this." I think, though, I saw a difference with the way the chefs were treating each other on the show. That happened organically. I think that's just happened along with the changes in our industry. I think also a lot of the chefs who were coming on now had been watching the show for years, and they were like, “I don't want to be that guy.” So, I think it's a combination of things.
But at a certain point, we realized, as the difference in age grew between the contestants and myself—I started doing the show when I was in my early 40s. I'm 62 right now—and so as that gap started to grow, I was like, "Listen, I have to mentor. I want to be in a mentor position." And so for me, I want to give feedback. It's not about the person, it's about the food. And that's all we care about. We don't care about what's going on behind the scenes. In fact, we don't know what's going on behind the scenes. We're kept away from it. I always love on social media when someone’s, "Did you see what so-and-so did?" It's like, "No, I didn't actually. I'm seeing it when you're seeing it." So, I think the chefs just started realizing things are different, our industry's different. We're going to work together. We're going to cook to win, but we're not going to attack the person. The ad hominem attacks are a thing of the past, I think, when it comes to that kind of competition. We weren't playing it up, and the producers weren't asking those leading questions to get them to respond, and I think the show is much better for it.
PN: Absolutely. Yeah. I agree.
TC: The tone is better. You go back and see some of those early seasons, I cringe. It's like, “Oh, God, this is horrible.” We feel much better about where we're at right now. We just finished the bulk of season 22. We have to go back for our finale. What a season. The chefs were really, really talented this season.
PN: I'm excited. I think Canada, right?
TC: Yeah. Usually you start the season, you figure there's maybe three or four people that are really, you know, you could see that they're going to really be up there. But this one, even the chefs that left early were just making good dishes. It was fantastic. Everybody's in for a treat. It's really good.
PN: That's awesome. How involved are you in coming up with the challenges? Are you involved with that or other people come up with that stuff?
TC: No, we have an entire production team that does that. Doneen Arquines, she's been with us from day one. She started as a PA and now she's our showrunner. Her and her team come up with the bulk of the challenges. The only one recently that I actually was involved in was last year, the Quickfire, the 20 questions Quickfire in Milwaukee. That was my idea.
PN: Oh, yeah. That was fun. That was a good one.
TC: That was fun. But no, I don't have a finger on the pulse of what works on TV. I have no idea. Even though I’ve been doing it for 20-plus years, it's like I don't know. A lot of stuff that I think will work, they were like, "Nah, that's just not interesting." But we have a great team. They actually get to the location well in advance of us shooting. They're doing the research. So, a lot of those challenges, they don't even start thinking about them until they're on location and seeing what's out there. But they do a fantastic job.
PN: Cool. They do, they do. Give them my regards. An ongoing theme in the book is what you call “the itch.” You have this constant hunger for novel experiences, to learn new things. Anytime you're in a kitchen, you've been there for a few years, you felt like you weren't growing or evolving in your work, you'd get the itch to go to find something new to challenge you. Where does your itch stand now? What's left for you to conquer? Or what are you excited to learn about next?
TC: I'm looking forward to retirement one day [laughs]. Which will never fully happen. I don't get the opportunity to cook in restaurants much. And that's the dirty little secret is chefs don't cook in their restaurants. Cooks cook in their restaurants. So, the example I like to use, if you go to see a piece of classical music and there's an orchestra playing, right? Philharmonic playing, the composer—
PN: The conductor.
TC: Well, no, I'll get to the conductor in a second.
PN: [Laughs].
TC: The composer is important. They wrote this music, but the conductor is getting the top billing, right? Now, you don't expect that conductor to jump in and pick up a violin and start playing. No. They're just conducting. And that's what chefs do. So, they set the tone. It's their recipes. It's their style of producing those recipes. It's their organization of the kitchen. But at nighttime, you're conducting, you're not cooking, you're not playing the violin. You're making sure that all those parts are working harmoniously together to produce food every night. That's what a chef does.
"Counseling is not a bad thing. It doesn't mean you're weak. It doesn't mean you're deficient somewhere. But it does help you become a better version of yourself."
But in terms of cooking, I cook a lot at home. I love doing dinner parties. I keep my finger in it. And then whenever I get the itch, we have Vallata, which is our Italian trattoria next to Craft. That's a very flexible space. So, if I decide one day or one week that, “You know what? I want to do a multicourse tasting menu because I have the itch to create new stuff,” I could do that. And food-wise, staying creative is, quite frankly, I’ve got to say, a lot of this stuff, I'll mess around with in my head and I'll put together a dish on paper, and that's enough for me. I don't feel this need, “I gotta get it out in the world now.”
But there are other creative avenues I have. I play guitar, wake up in the morning and play for an hour or so. I don't write music at all, but it is creative. It's a creative outlet for me. When I was first coming up and I was focused much more on food in a restaurant, not the business of it. But now I have a business, and they’re different sides of your brain, and it's very hard to go back and forth. So, I have to find creative outlets, well, creative stimulus outside of my office. And so, for me, that's going to a farmer's market, it's going to a museum, it's going to hear a concert. Whatever it is, can stir that creativity. It doesn't always mean that I sit there and I’ve got to have food in front of me to be creative, because the stimulus comes from somewhere else, not only being in a kitchen. And a lot of it does come through going through a farmer's market, where you see things together. Doing the book and doing the recipes for the book, to me, that was a hugely creative process because I literally would go and just put food on the table and say, "Okay, I have these ingredients, let's cook." And that was fun.
PN: Okay, so for this last round of questions, bear with me here. We're going to call it our Quickfire round. I'm just going to ask you some quick questions. Don't think about them too long or hard. You can just give me your gut answer. Your favorite food city?
TC: God, I don't know. I don't get to enough of them. I live in New York, so maybe New York. Although, I’ve got to say, when I was in Singapore, we shot our finale there years ago, and I landed in Singapore and I was coming in from Australia. Going into our hotel, I ran into some of the crew. I was like, "I'm really starving. Where should I go?" And there was a food hall. This is before food halls got big in America. It was amazing. Food in Singapore is like a sport. The hawker stands are amazing. That was exceptional. Also, I love crab, and for me chili crab is about as good as it gets, and there was a lot of that there. It was an exciting food town.
PN: All right, I'll have to get there someday. Favorite cookbook that's not one of your own?
TC: Unplugged Kitchen by Viana La Place. It's a small cookbook. I like it because the assumption is that you know how to cook if you're buying this book. Not everything is measured out. There's something about it that I really like. I also like Nigel Slater's books. He's a British cookbook author who I like a lot.
PN: Best thing you ever ate on Top Chef?
TC: Oh, boy. I can't tell you because it happened this season that we just shot!
PN: Oh, man. Okay.
TC: And also I have a hard time remembering the dishes from back then. I always, when asked this question, I would always go back, Paul Qui made this dish that was just so simple. It was a dashi with some roasted vegetables. And there was something about it that was just so simple and so delicious. What happens on our show, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of dishes, a lot of food that we'll get that I don't think would be made anywhere outside of the experience on the show, because the challenge forced you to do something. And sometimes there's just crazy good stuff that happens. So, there's one dish, we're like, “Wow, this is one of the best dishes I've ever had on the show.” Well, three dishes later, something comes that's better.
PN: Okay, next question. Is ketchup an acceptable condiment on a hotdog?
TC: You know, I recently just saw when Anthony Bourdain interviewed Barack Obama, and he was like, "Not if you're more than six” [laughs].
PN: Right. My husband thinks it's sacrilege! I know people have some really strong opinions on this.
TC: I don't like it. But then again, I don't eat hot dogs, so whatever. Listen, my feeling is, whatever you want to do, you do. People say, "Oh, you serve a steak and somebody asks for ketchup, what do you do?" I give it to them. What do I care? You paid for your meal. If you want to douse it with ketchup, that's fine. Just don't douse it with ketchup and then complain to me you don't like it.
PN: Right. Yes. That's fair enough.
TC: I don't feel I should be the food police. You do what you want to do.
PN: Okay, what's your least favorite food?
TC: Okra. Hate it.
PN: Oh, yeah. I'm with you on that.
TC: Absolutely hate it.
PN: It gets very slimy very easily.
TC: That's what I don't like. I don't like that. And mountain yam. The Japanese mountain yam, same reason. It's slimy. It's just terrible.
PN: Yeah. Never had that one. But I'll stay away. What's a food trend you wish would die?
TC: Microgreens. Stop it. Oh, and the swoosh on the plate. Stop with the swoosh on the plate. It's been done. It's over. Stop it.
PN: Okay, last question. If you could choose your last meal, what would it be? And are you cooking it, or is someone else cooking it for you?
TC: This is easy. Every Sunday growing up was Sunday gravy, and that's the last meal that I want to have. I don't think my mother will be around then [laughs]. She is still alive. I don't know who's cooking it, someone's cooking it. But that's what I want to go out eating.
PN: Oh, I love that. Nice. Well, thank you so much, Tom. This has been such a treat to talk to you. This has been great. Thank you so much for taking the time today.
TC: Sure. Of course. Thank you.
PN: And listeners, you can get Why I Cook by Tom Colicchio on Audible now.
