Q What’s your favorite recipe and why?
Spetzle. It was the first thing I ever made at my first job.
Q What’s your favorite combination of junk food and junk TV?
Saturday Night Live - the old ones are hilarious – with Snickers bars.
Q Who would you like to invite to a dinner party (from history or today) and what would you serve?
I would love to serve Bill Murray - he’d make any dinner fun. I’m all about great New England food, so I would probably serve fresh caught striped bass with Watch Hill oysters to really show the character of the area.
Q What food do you hate?
I’m not a fan of gelatin desserts or anything thickened with gelatin.
Q What’s you favorite kitchen tool or machine?
A big immersion blender, they’re great for soups and puree sauces.
Q What is the hardest food for you to cook?
Anything over and over again. Like stuffed chicken breasts, I do ten thousand of them a year and it just gets old.
Q If you owned Milliway’s, “the restaurant at the end of the universe” - what would you serve as the universe’s last ever dish?
It would have to be a seared foie gras with gingered apples and we would have to have a bottle of Chateau D’Yquem.
Q Who’s the best chef in the world other than you or your mum?
Julia Child – she had an amazing attitude towards cooking in that you can do anything, and if it doesn’t quite look right, you can salvage it and make it presentable. You learn a lot from that as you go through this business.
Q What’s your favorite cookbook?
My favorite cookbook doesn’t have a name, so we just called it, “the plaid cookbook.” It came with the wood stove that my grandmother had, and all the recipes were geared towards cooking on a wood stove. That’s how I learned to cook. I revert to that cookbook often, since it’s gone through the family and a lot of great recipes are written in the margins.
Q What do you have in your refrigerator?
Sausage casings, since you never know when your going to need to stuff sausages, lots of condiments, pickles that I’ve made, relishes and chutneys that I’ve made, and of course, smiley fries for the kids.
Read more about Johnson & Wales Inn at The Restaurant Review