TTT Interviewee: Tom Colicchio Session #2 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub New York City Date: May 12, 2011 Q: This is Judith Weinraub. It is May 12, 2011, and I’m with Tom Colicchio at his restaurant Colicchio & Sons off the High Line in New York City. Hi there. Colicchio: How are you doing? Q: Before we move on to the Gramercy Tavern/craft period, I wondered if we could talk about the Gramercy Tavern and how you shaped it, how and why it was set up the way it was, and did it work the way that you wanted it to. Colicchio: It definitely worked the way we wanted it to. You know, the space was quite large; it was 10,000 square feet. We knew we had to have a kitchen on the ground floor and then a prep kitchen in the basement. Our offices were in the basement. But upstairs when we saw the space, it was a pretty wide-open space. There were some columns in there, and I think coming out of the— Q: Structural columns. Colicchio: Yes. Coming out of the eighties where there were a lot of these large restaurants, there were sort of big open spaces like Gotham and places like that. We wanted a large restaurant. Obviously, the economics of running a large restaurant is better than a small restaurant, but we still wanted the restaurant to feel intimate, and so what we actually did was counterintuitive to what you would normally do. We added different columns to the space, because we wanted to create these corners and these places of intimacy. So if you look at Gramercy, there are four different dining areas, actually five including the private dining room. There’s a bar area, which we separated from the main restaurant. Then in the dining rooms there are three smaller dining rooms that compose the dining room. So there’s the main room when you first walk in, and then there’s another small room off to the left, and then there’s a room in the back. The way we broke them all up was there are different ceiling designs in each one. One is a barrel vault, one has a coffered ceiling, and one is just, I think, open beams. So the idea was to create these episodes, and so the idea is that you walk into the restaurant and the restaurant would unveil itself to you slowly, as opposed you walk in and you see the whole thing. It also gave us the opportunity for a lot of corners. People like dining in corners, so it gave us a lot of opportunity for corners, a lot of great wall space for artwork and stuff like that. Because we knew early on, I mean Danny and I had talked about what the next sort of iconic Americana establishment that we can sort of modernize, so he had Union Square Café, there was also Gotham Bar and Grill, which wasn’t a bar and grill, but still it was an updated version. Just like Union Square [Café] wasn’t sort of typical of what a café would be; it was a more updated version of that. So we thought about what was the next thing, and we stumbled upon tavern and the idea of the tavern being a place—usually it was just a place to eat in town, or along the road going from one town to the next town you’d find a tavern. Sometimes they had rooms, sometimes they didn’t, but it was usually a hub for the community, and so we wanted to create that kind of atmosphere. The restaurant itself was such a large space, I was very concerned with having 250 seats in a dining room, and so that’s why we broke it up to a tavern or front room and then a dining room, with the idea that we would do a separate menu in the front and the back. Then we had enough room to put a grill, so everything was cooked off a wood-burning grill for the front room only, and that made the menus completely different. We wanted that tavern part of the restaurant to be a relatively inexpensive experience and also an experience that we were only doing walk-ins, we weren’t taking reservations, because we wanted to have that sense of community where if you were in a neighborhood, you could just drop in and get a table. Q: Was there any other really upscale dining establishment at that point that had done that? Colicchio: Well, yes, there was. Chez Panisse had the upstairs that was casual and downstairs was fine dining. Q: But that’s far away. Colicchio: Well, yes, but we knew of that restaurant. It wasn’t that we didn’t know about that restaurant. In the city, I’m not sure. Again, the space that we found really dictated what we were going to do. Again, because the space was so large, I was nervous doing that many seats, and so that’s why we decided to do the front room and it became the tavern. That was the tavern part of the room, the big bar. Then, you know, we got lucky where Danny [Meyer] had a friend who was an artist, Bob Kushner, who provided that incredible mural for us. It’s not Bob. I’m blanking on his name. [Interruption] Q: Robert Kushner. Colicchio: Yes, who provided this incredible mural for us at such a great price because we couldn’t afford it. He’s a fairly well known artist, so that was a nice favor, and that really, I think, set the tone. Again, both of us, I think Danny and I both sort of felt that if we brought somebody in like Kushner to create this mural, that it wasn’t about telling him what to do; it was like, “This is what we’re doing in the restaurant. What do you think would work here?” And he created the mural. It’s just beautiful, and I think that really set the tone. We had this idea of early American, but, again, modernizing it, and so we went shopping for antiques at all the antique shows, because we wanted it to feel authentic. We didn’t want to do Pottery Barn Americana. We really wanted it to be authentic, and so we spent way too much money buying those things, and they had no business being in a restaurant, but they held up pretty well. Peter Bentel, who was the architect who designed it, we talked about this idea we wanted the place to wear in well. We wanted the bar, this black ebony bar, and we knew it was going to get worn, and the idea was don’t ever refinish this bar. I don’t know if it’s been refinished since, but I remember we had a general manager come in, this one area was worn out, and he said, “I’m going to refinish the bar,” and I said, “No, you’re not. Leave it alone. Don’t touch it.” We wanted this idea of this patina--that the place would weather and age really well. Flowers were also very important. We had an in-house florist who just created essentially this table, this harvest table you walked by, filled with flowers, and to me that really kind of set the tone as well. Q: Did everybody have flowers then the way they do now? Colicchio: Yes, I think so. Q: It’s my recollection that it had an extraordinary cheese deal. Colicchio: Yes, and we were one of the first American restaurants to definitely do that. I think Terrance Brennan came up with it right after that and, I would say, probably did it better than we did, but that was something that we wanted. Danny and I, before we opened the restaurant, we took a trip to Italy together, and that was one thing that we always ordered, and it was like why isn’t an American restaurant doing this and doing it well? And so that’s something that we focused on. In fact, when I came back, before the restaurant opened up—because it was two years between when we first started talking and when the restaurant opened up—I spent a portion of that time working at Dean & Deluca in their cheese shop. Q: Learning or— Colicchio: Yes, I wanted to learn more about cheese, and that was a good way to do it. They had a great program. I worked one or two days a week. In fact, I don’t even think they paid me. I just wanted to go there and see how they handled their cheese. I think it’s like anything, if you want to get good at it, you have to be around it. You have to absorb it. So definitely that was planned from day one. We trained the staff on it. Yes, that was something we purposely went after. Q: This was strictly for the tavern part? Colicchio: No. Dining room, tavern. Q: The menu was less expensive, but also in the sense that you didn’t have to order a whole meal in the front. Colicchio: Right, right. In the back was prix fixe, and the front was à la carte, and, yes, nothing was over $20 on the menu, at least when I was there, and that was all by design. We wanted a place that you can drop by. The restaurant needed to be a destination restaurant in the back, but it also needed to be a neighborhood restaurant in the front. The front, I always thought, set the tone for that entire restaurant. It was always busy and bustling and happening, and it was an eclectic group of people who were always in there, so it wasn’t your typical, like, you know, only bankers go to this one restaurant and this other restaurant is all artists. This was a good cross-section of people in New York. But, yes, it was all by design. It was one of those things where sometimes you do it and it doesn’t work, and sometimes you do it and it just works and you know it. This was one of those times. Q: How aware of your success in achieving your goal were you at the time? Colicchio: Oh, very. Yes, because just the numbers. But it took time to grow, and we weren’t an immediate success, I don’t think. I think the restaurant got a so-so review when we opened up. We got two stars at a time when two stars—now it’s a little tougher. I think you can get two stars now, it’s good. Then we weren’t shooting for two; we were shooting for three. Quite frankly, I thought we deserved more. I didn’t think the restaurant was—we had problems. We had a lot of problems when we first opened up, just really dealing with—I mean, the day before we opened up, we were on the cover of New York Magazine, Danny and I. I don’t know if you remember the cover, but there were four stars on the cover and they said “Is this the next four-star restaurant?” And there were eight pages of—you know. So the expectations were so high. We could never live up to them when we first opened up, but it took a lot of work. For me, in the kitchen, I would purposely dumb-down the food that I was doing at Mondrian because the restaurant was so much bigger, and I remember we were doing—I don’t know if we covered this last time. We were doing about 230, 240 covers every night in the dining room, and I got to a point, “You know, this isn’t working for me.” I wanted to make food better, but the only way to do that is to cut covers. I couldn’t do 240 a night anymore. So I remember going to Danny and our other partner, Larry Goldberg, who was a GM at the time, saying, “I want to bring this back. I want to drop down to about 180 covers a night. I want to add some tasting menus. I want to make the food better, and I guarantee you we’ll do more money.” They both looked at me like I was crazy. “How is that? That doesn’t seem to work.” I said, “You’ve got to trust me on this one. We can’t keep going on doing these kind of numbers.” And we did that. We actually took some seats out of the restaurant, offered a tasting menu, and we did this right around the time of the Beard Awards, too, because we opened—I don’t remember anymore. It’s almost like eight or nine months until the awards came around, and I knew that since we were the new restaurant in town, a lot of people would be coming in. I was like, “I can’t do the food I’m doing right now. I’ve got to make this better.” And I think that’s when the restaurant changed. Danny has a very different story about how the restaurant sort of turned the corner. Q: What is his story? Colicchio: You’d have to ask him. Q: Did it have to do with the food or— Colicchio: No, it’s a different story. Q: When you say dumbed-down, in terms of the number of steps? Colicchio: Just the way we were cooking it, precooking some things. Yes, the steps of it. It really wasn’t where it needed to be. Conceptually I was trying to also conceive of dishes that we can expedite quickly as opposed to just putting together great dishes. I think it all came together. Nick Mautone was our general manager. Paul Grieco, who now has Hearth and Terroir wine bars, was our beverage director, our service director. Claudia Fleming was in the kitchen doing desserts. There was just a ton of talent in that restaurant, and so many people went on to be chefs or well-known front-of-house people or wine people from that restaurant. It was a matter of just pulling all that together. From that moment we changed the food, that kind of changed things for the kitchen, but the restaurant getting to where it ended up, as far as the financial success of the restaurant, the critical success of the restaurant, it was a lot of hard work. It was day in and day out. I would stay after service. In the private dining room, the wait staff would do their paperwork at the end of the night, and I would sit in there and we’d all have cocktails at the end of the night, and sit there and listen to them. We would have these meetings and sit there. It was just very impromptu, and listen to what they were having to say, difficulties. The next day I’d go to work and sit down with management and go, “I listened to staff. Try X, Y, Z. These are the things they’re complaining about. This is what we can get better.” They said, “When is this happening?” I said, “It happens at one o’clock in the morning when you guys aren’t here.” [laughs] But it was something that we worked on every single day to make that restaurant what it was. I don’t think you can sort of point to a particular moment or a particular thing that sort of turned the corner, but it was a lot of hard work, lot of hours. Q: So between the time that you felt that was a success and the time when you thought about craft, what happened eventually? Did you get bored? Did you need another challenge? Did you want to make more money? Colicchio: No, it wasn’t about being bored; it was about challenging yourself and also having something else inside that you want to get out. It’s not just about this one type of food. I wanted to do something else. Part of it is in this day and age of chefs and restaurateurs, if you do it once, do it again. On the other hand, there’s a business that we’re running and if you can handle two or three or four restaurants, you know, why not? So I wanted to continue to grow and continue to do new things. Q: Because your books were starting to— Colicchio: Well, it had nothing to do with that. It was really about— Q: No, I just mean it’s a lot to balance. Colicchio: Yes, but it’s really not. It is and it isn’t. It’s all just work. You put together a team of people and you figure out a way to work the books. We would meet twice a week in the morning at my apartment and go through recipes and work with the writer. My wife actually ended up writing the book. I [originally] had another writer on the project. So it’s a process, and you just sort of stick to it and that’s it, and that’s how we would do it. I would still go to work. I would do that from nine o’clock in the morning until twelve, one o’clock, and then I’d go to work at two o’clock in the afternoon and work till twelve, one o’clock at night. The photography we did all in the restaurant. We had [unclear] in the back, so I’d do all the dishes and do the photography. It’s just a matter of managing your time. Danny had decided that he wanted to grow. We were looking at some other restaurants. I had planned on staying, up to this point, with the Union Square Hospitality Group, and then I decided not to. I, quite frankly, didn’t like the— Q: Corporate, I guess? Colicchio: No, I got ….. [Interruption] Colicchio: So Danny had started growing Union Square Hospitality Group, Two Spaces and Tabla and 11 Madison, and right around this time he created the Union Square Hospitality Group, and I didn’t like my role in the company. I wanted to have the freedom to open new restaurants where I did what I did at Gramercy. I designed it; I built it; I was the chef there; I was the managing partner there. And clearly that was not my role. He had brought other people who would do that, so if I did another restaurant, I would be involved in the food and that was it, and that’s not what I wanted to do. And I got it. I understood it, but it’s not what I wanted to do. So I saw the space that became craft. It was actually a chairman who was head of the co-op board approached me and wanted to talk to me about garbage and pest control, things like that, and I asked him if I could see the space. He said, “Well, we have a lease. We’re ready to sign with another group. I just wanted to talk to you about it.” Okay. A month or two went by, I didn’t see anything happening there. I called him back and I said, “Well, did you sign a lease?” He said, “No, we didn’t. It fell apart.” I said, “Do you want to talk?” He said, “We have somebody else.” I said, “Okay.” A couple months go by, nothing’s happening again. Contact him again. He said, “No, that fell through. Let’s talk.” So we worked out a deal, and the restaurant opened. Gramercy was part of Union Square Hospitality Group. There were separate owners. It wasn’t owned by the Union Square Hospitality Group; it was owned by me and Danny and one other partner. Well, Danny’s mother, I think, and uncle and my partner, Robert Scott. I was an investor in the restaurant, and the way that worked is Robert Scott, who owned Mondrian and came with us to invest in Gramercy, he guaranteed a loan for me. So I had to put money in the restaurant and I had to repay this loan, so I was an investor alongside of everybody, and that’s the way that was set up. So craft opens up, and my intention was to do both. At some point, Danny came to me and said, “We can’t both own this restaurant anymore. One of us should own it.” I said, “Well, I’m not leaving, so if that’s what you really believe, then give me a number and I’ll put together a buyout.” Q: We did talk about the philosophy of craft. What we didn’t talk about in 2001 was 9/11 and when that fit into the opening of the restaurant, when you got married, all of that. Colicchio: The restaurant opened right before 9/11. It opened in—I think it was May. No, it wasn’t May. We’re in May now. We just celebrated our anniversary. March. So we were open a few months before 9/11. I don’t know what you wanted. Q: I wanted you to talk a little bit about your response to 9/11, what happened in terms of getting the food down there, and also that you got married at a difficult time. Colicchio: Yes, I got married four days after. I was on the Vineyard when it happened. I got married on Martha’s Vineyard, so I was there when it happened. Q: But you did play a role, as I understand it, in going down there and helping. Colicchio: So many of us did, yes. There was a boat that was donated by, I think—I forget who did that now. Yachts, I guess. They anchored a boat down by the Winter Garden and there was a feeding station. So rescue workers would come in at night or go during the day, and that’s where they would eat. I worked midnight shift, so I got down there at twelve o’clock at night and I’d work till eight o’clock in the morning. It didn’t last. I think I did it for a couple weeks, and then they just didn’t need it anymore. Q: Did going out to eat in general drop off? Colicchio: Oh, sure, sure, sure. I mean, well, we closed for a few days. Yes. People were nervous. People were scared. Business came back, but, yes, it wasn’t great right after we opened it, this happened. I think having a dip in business paled in comparison to what people lost. Q: So craft got going. Were you thinking, once that got going, how you could expand your business, your talents, your what? Colicchio: No. It wasn’t about sort of sitting down and having a master plan of what would happen. Things have a way of happening in our business. After craft opened up, we won a Beard Award for best new restaurant. The day after the awards, I met Gamal Aziz, who was the president of the MGM, and he was in for lunch and said, “I want to talk to you about doing something in Vegas.” I said, “Oh, great. Let’s talk.” Flew out to Vegas, met with him, and he showed me the space. He said, “We want you to do a steakhouse.” I said, “Well, I’m really not interested in doing a steakhouse. I just opened craft. I would love to do another craft.” He said, “Well, you can do whatever you want as long as it’s a steakhouse.” I was like, “Okay.” But then I thought about it and I was like, well, you know, I could easily see how you can adapt a craft model to a steakhouse. In fact, it was reversed the other way. I looked at steakhouses and said, well, why can’t you do really high-end food, where you order your protein and you order your sides. So it was a very easy fit. So we agreed to do that, and they also let my team do it. Peter Bentel designed it. It has a very sort of craft feel to it, and wildly successful. Q: How many top-end restaurants were out there at that point? Colicchio: Oh, it was already the beginning of—the first wave already had passed. Jean Georges’s Prime Steakhouses were already there. Charlie Palmer already had his steakhouse out there. When I thought about it, all the restaurants doing really well out there were all steakhouses. So I was like, you know what? Let’s not fight this. Things just kind of happened for us because of real estate. We had the space right next door to craft became available, and that’s where we did craftbar, the first craftbar. Marco Canora and I are both Italian Americans. He was a chef at craft at the time. We both talked about doing this sort of casual Italian almost wine-bar-type restaurant, and so that’s what we did. So that was, again, wildly successful. There was a two-hour wait at night to get into the restaurant. We since then moved it around the corner to a bigger location, but then the space next door to that was available. Originally, we had the name ‘wichcraft, my wife threw out there, for craftbar. I said, “That’s a great name, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.” So when we got that third space, Sisha Ortuzar, who’s my partner now and co-founder of ʼwichcraft, he’s the one who came up to me at one point and said, “Why don’t we do sandwiches. We have this great name. Why don’t we do it?” And so we did it. But if you looked at what we did, and this was the only thing we really did by design, was that we want these difference price points. We want craft to be the flagship, and that was a high-end $100-a-person check average, and then we wanted to have something in the $50-check range, craftbar, and then ‘wichcraft was even lower, $12-check average. So we felt that as long as there was a thread that we could weave through the whole thing, that this would be a successful model. We kind of looked at clothing designers. If you look at, like, Ralph Lauren, there’s Purple label, there’s Polo, there’s Ralph Lauren, there’s R&L, and they’re all different price points, but there is a certain quality that goes through the whole line. So we actually looked at that as a model as to how we can sort of price this. It worked out really well. We didn’t have any help with branding at all. We kind of did it ourselves. It all just kind of grew organically. Q: You mean into a numbers of locations? Colicchio: Yes. Q: I’m at the library a lot at 42nd Street, and it just seems like— What do you call it in a shopping mall when some place is the prime place? Colicchio: The anchor. Q: Yes. It does seem to have that feel to it, not to mention the fact that the food is better than anything else around there. Colicchio: ‘wichcraft was sort of its own business. Actually, it’s a separate company. Q: Do you play a role now in figuring out where and when to open new ones? Colicchio: I play a little bit of a role. My guys, they come to me and say, “We’re looking at a location. What do you think?” And I’ll give my blessing. To that extent, yes. Q: So what happened between that period of your life and Top Chef? Colicchio: I got a call out of the blue from a producer who said, “We’re doing this food show. It’s a reality show, and we think you’d be great as a judge.” I was like, “Nah, no interest.” They called me back a week later and said, “We really think you’d be great for the show. Can we send someone just to interview you?” I was like, “Fine.” So they someone with a little handheld camera and asked me a few questions on camera. They called me back a week later and they said, “We’d love you to come out to L.A. for a screen test.” I said, “No, I’m not coming out to L.A. for a screen test. Here’s what I’ll do.” There was an ABC producer, produced news, who did a documentary series on—it’s called Life 360, and they did one on restaurants. There were supposed to be three different restaurants, but they ended up just using us. They got there and we were opening craft. So from the very early planning stages to when it opened, they documented the whole thing. So I said, “Listen, we have this whole series. I’ll send it to you.” So I sent them. Then they called up, said, “We want to make an offer.” That’s when I started taking them seriously. I was all like, “All right. Let me think about this.” I sat down with them. I was familiar with Project Runway. They produced that. Q: Familiar from the point of watching it? Colicchio: Yes, a little bit, just aware of it. So once they told me they did that, I watched it, and they sent me some tapes and I watched it. They told me what they were looking for my sort of role to be. It was kind of a combination of a Tim Gunn mentor and a Michael Kors judge, that kind of role. I was like, “All right,” and I, for some reason, agreed to do it. Q: I was looking online and I saw—I guess it was a promo of you with Kathy Lee Joel. Colicchio: (nods and smiles) That was an early one, yes. Q: You looked a little doubtful about how all of this was really going to materialize, or what would materialize. I wondered if you could describe what your concerns were. Colicchio: No one tells you how to do it. They don’t tell you how to do TV, so all of a sudden, you get there and they throw you into the situation. I was comfortable at this point in front of the camera from doing Today Show spots and things like that, so that wasn’t much of an issue. But just the format and how we were going to work this. These very things that we do now, we take for granted now, these are things that it’s like one day all of sudden someone will say, “Well, why don’t we try this?” I remember one day at the end of judges’ table, I just decided to do this rundown on each contest that was there, and when I was finished, they went, “That was great.” So that’s something we do all the time now. Q: Genius. Colicchio: Well, it’s not. For me, it’s not that at all. It just felt right. For me, I’m not an actor and I’m not there to deliver some witty one-liners and sort of knock the chefs down. For me, if we were going to do this, I wanted it to be a serious food show, I want the chefs to be high-caliber chefs and I wanted the conversation to be about the food. I didn’t want to go to sort of a personal thing. All that personal stuff that happens behind the scene, we don’t see it, we don’t know about it, we don’t care about it, and my feeling was that the only way for this to be successful, because you can’t eat the food, as a viewer you can’t experience the food, the only way to experience the food is through a conversation that the judges are having about the dishes. From day one, it was like, “Listen, this has to be about the food. It has to be a conversation that we’re serious about, or it’s not going to work. If we’re going to come here and just kind of throw out one-liners, this isn’t going to last three seasons and it’s going to be a joke.” My biggest concern was that the industry wouldn’t take this seriously. Q: I was wondering about that, because when it first came out, people said, “Tom Colicchio? What is this about?” So you must have said the same thing. [both laugh] Colicchio: Oh, I did. When we were shooting this thing, I was like, “Oh, what did I get myself into? This is going to be tough.” And the first season was, but, luckily, we had good contestants the first season. I think that’s what really made it, having chefs like Lee Ann and Harold and Tiffani. They were all really strong, and personalities like a Dave or a Stephen. So it was a good combination of people who really cared about food, but a good combination of strong personalities and some really good cooks. So it worked. God knows why, but it worked. Q: Did you have a role in choosing the— Colicchio: No. Q: Who does that? Colicchio: There’s casting agents that do it. Q: So that you see these people when? When they first turn up for the season? Colicchio: When they’re on camera the first time is when we see them the first time. We are not allowed to interact with the contestants at all when we’re shooting. Unless we’re on camera, we can’t talk to them. There’s a group of PAs that keep them away from us to the point where we’re not even allowed to walk by them. I mean, they really keep it on lockdown. All that stuff that goes on in the house and all that, we have no idea that’s going on. So it’s really honest. The other thing, when I first started, when I agreed to do this, I said, “Listen, I’m not going to be a pawn of some producer. The judges have to decide who stays and who goes.” They were like, “Yes, that’s fine,” and they’ve never, with the exception of one person who physically manhandled someone that had to go home, producers never choose who stays and who goes. Q: It sounds like, then, that you had a fairly big role in actually developing the format. Colicchio: It wasn’t a role that was given to me from the beginning. It just happened, again, organically, just going through it. I don’t watch reality TV, so I have no idea what would work, what wouldn’t work, but it just felt like this is what we should be doing. This is the kind of way it should work. You know, it’s great. We’ve got a great production team. Again, my concern was that I wanted the industry to at least look at this and say, “Hey, this is worthwhile,” and they have. I knew we had something when in the second season, I started getting calls from chefs saying, “Can I be a judge? How do I get on the show?” Q: Oh, my goodness. Colicchio: Now there is only one person that is a well-known chef who hasn’t done the show, and it’s Mario Batali. He just won’t do it for whatever reason. And he watches the show. He’s a fan. His kids watch it. But he doesn’t want to be that guy. Q: Why do you think that they want to do it? Colicchio: Exposure. Sure. Again, I didn’t do it for the exposure, because I didn’t know—I took a risk. And also, I’d seen other reality shows, and if this ever turned into like let’s eat bugs, I’m out. I’m done. Q: Did you watch any cooking shows at any other point in your life, or for that matter before you did this? Colicchio: Not really, no. Q: Not even Jacques Pépin? Colicchio: I read Jacques’ books and I learned a lot from his books, but, no, I don’t watch—I find the stand-and-stir shows to be boring. I don’t learn anything. I know how to cook, so I’m not watching to learn, and I just find them all to be somewhat boring. As a professional chef I do. I’m sure as a casual or as a hobbyist [cook], yes, you learn a lot. Q: What a lot of people say about Jacques Pépin is his hands are so extraordinary and it’s fascinating, the knife skills. You don’t need that. The rest of us do need it. Colicchio: I see that, yes. But that’s different when you’re—I mean, Jacques is a professional chef who spent many, many years with a knife in his hand, and so that doesn’t impress me. It’s like, oh, yes, of course, why not. [laughs] I hope he’s that good. He’s a great guy, Jacques. He’s the best, really. I spent some time with him last week. He’s amazing. Q: It’s a very welcoming personality. Colicchio: And the Jacques and Julia [Child] series, that’s just so iconic. If I’m surfing and see it on, I’ll watch it for five minutes and go, “That’s great,” and move on. Q: So how does this work in your life? You go where for how long? Colicchio: One month. Q: But where do you physically— Colicchio: It all depends. First season was San Francisco, second season was L.A., then Miami, then Chicago, then Vegas. Q: What I mean is it a studio that is replaced in— Colicchio: Yes. Q: I see. How does that work? Colicchio: They pick it up and rebuild it. We rented a warehouse. They build the kitchen, the Top Chef kitchen in that studio, but then we do a lot of location stuff. But once we go to a town, we typically don’t move. We stay there. We’ll travel a little bit, but we always have to go back to judges’ table that’s in the studio. It takes about a month to shoot the whole thing, five weeks tops, and I work every other day, because I don’t do the Quickfires. So it takes two days to shoot an episode, one day for Quickfire, announcing the elimination challenge, following the nomination, and that’s it. Then the third day, we’re back into Quickfire. There’s no break. Q: So how many are in each season? Colicchio: If there are seventeen contestants or eighteen contestants, there’s usually fifteen episodes, because you go to the finale with three, so fifteen, sixteen episodes. Sixteen, I think, with the reunion. We’ll do everything leading up to the finale, so we’ll shoot everything but the finale, and then we’ll wait three or four months and then shoot the finale. Q: Can you describe how this has changed your life? I assume, first of all, financially it’s changed your life. Maybe not. Colicchio: First three seasons, they didn’t pay us much at all. It’s a risk everybody takes. It’s definitely better now. Not that much financially. Things come out of it that financially are great, like commercials. I did two commercials. And also personal appearances, also speaking engagements, which could be very lucrative and they’re fairly easy to do hours of your time. I don’t do a whole lot of them only because I have a business to run, so I can’t be on the road as much. I need to be here. I need to be around. So I’ll do a few. There’s a downside of the show, for me, anyway, and that is, if you ask the average person, they would say that I spend three or four months doing the show and I’m no longer in my restaurants, because all I do is TV, and it’s just not the truth. Q: That would be very irritating. Colicchio: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told this to journalists, and they never print it. So when I say it takes about twenty-five days of a year to shoot the show, they think I’m lying to them. People think that you spend a week doing the show, and then it airs, and then you’re back and you work another week, and then it airs and you do another week. So if there are sixteen episodes, it’s sixteen weeks. So for sixteen weeks I’m doing the show. I’ve had people literally walk into my restaurant Wednesday nights saying, “What are you doing here?” “What are you talking about?” “Don’t you have a TV show to do?” Like, “Are you kidding me? We shot that in August, like last year.” “Really?” “Yes.” There’s this whole other sort of idea that if you’re doing TV, you’ve sold out and you’re not a chef anymore. It’s silly. Q: I would imagine it would make you want to stay in the kitchen longer. Colicchio: Well, actually, because of TV, there’s things that I did to combat that, and that’s Tuesday dinners. We had this open kitchen in our private dining room. I’ll go do these dinners and physically I’m there and you’ll see that I’m there, and, to me, that was something that came directly from this idea that I’m not in the kitchen anymore. It is frustrating, because I do spend time in my restaurants and I like to spend time in my restaurants. The last month I’ve taken off because I’ve had a baby. Frankly, family commitments take me out of the restaurant more than the TV show does. Last night, my son’s going to nursery school, and there was a parents’ thing, get-together for nursery school, so I was out of my restaurant. Q: Then you’ll have back-to-school night. [laughs] Colicchio: I will have all that stuff happening again. I’ll have to start looking for colleges for my son, so I’ve got to take him on the road looking for colleges, my older son. Q: You’re really going to do a road trip? Colicchio: Yes. Q: That will startle people. Well, actually, for that matter, do people feel because you’re on television all the time, they can just come up to you and you’ll talk to them? Colicchio: Yes. Q: How does that work? Colicchio: Well, sometimes it’s fine and sometimes it is not. Living in New York City, usually if you’re walking down the street somebody will give a nod, they recognize you. They may say, “Hey, I like the show.” That’s great. Usually I’ll respond back. Where it really gets crazy is at a food event. Q: You mean like the food and wine thing in Aspen? Colicchio: It gets a little nutty. Aspen’s not as bad as say some others, but it gets a little crazy. They start grabbing at you. I’m like, “There’s no need to grab me. You want to take a picture, ask. I’ll take a picture. You don’t have to grab me.” It’s like, “What’s going on here?” It’s bizarre. Q: Television makes you personal property of people? Colicchio: I guess. And if you say, no, on a blog you’re some jerk that doesn’t care. But, you know, I’m having to deal with my family. I don’t need someone—it’s annoying. Q: Actually, since you mentioned blogging, you do blog for Top Chef. Colicchio: Yes. Q: Have you done that since the beginning? Colicchio: I think from the second season on. Q: How do you decide what to do or how much time to give to it? Colicchio: It all depends. Usually it’s a recap of the episode. Occasionally I’ll get on a soapbox. When we had Stephanie, who won season four, I think it was, there was talk about the first woman winner, and my feeling was that I don’t think she wants to be known as the first woman winner. She’s a chef who happens to be a woman. I talked about equality in the workplace and specific to the restaurant industry and why more women—it’s not surprising that she’s the first woman to win Top Chef, because, quite frankly, there aren’t a lot of women in our industry. When we cast the show, we cast equal amounts of men and women, and that’s also another reason why a lot of times the women are the first couple to go. It’s just there are very few women chefs. I list all the social reasons why I think that happens. Q: It’s hard to have a family life if you’re going to try to do that [unclear]. Colicchio: It’s hard to have a family if you’re a man, too, but socially there’s a different set of expectations, right? Q: Yes. Colicchio: And we don’t set those. I mean, I don’t set that up. But it is difficult. It’s very difficult. If you look at probably the two most influential chefs in the last ten years, Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller, neither one of them are married. Ferran just got married, and they don’t have kids. So I think that the whole family life really gets in the way a lot more than TV does. TV is not that big of a deal, but definitely it changes your life, and not always for the best. Q: How much have you expanded your business or been able to expand your business since you’ve been doing Top Chef? Colicchio: Well, again, my business is run complete independent from that show. It’s a completely different process, so the business just runs. Again, it takes so little of my time, I don’t ever consider like should I open a restaurant or do another season. It’s just not part of the equation. Q: What is a workweek like when you’re not doing Top Chef? Colicchio: I’m usually in the restaurant somewhere between twelve and two, sometimes as early as ten. Before the new baby, sometimes I’d get in the office at ten o’clock and work until like ten o’clock at night. It all depends. Sometimes I’m here. I might have to run out of the office, out of the restaurant and go somewhere else. When Colicchio & Sons first opened up, I was here from like ten in the morning until twelve o’clock at night for the first three months at least. I dialed that back a little bit where I was coming in a little later, but I’m usually working from twelve o’clock to ten o’clock, around. Q: You must get a lot of requests to do charitable events. Colicchio: Yes. Q: I realize all chefs do, but how do you figure that out? Colicchio: If it’s a friend asking, I’ll almost always say yes, even if I’m not connected to whatever charity it is. The things that I like to support are hunger issues, children’s issues, and the environment. I pick and choose. I mean, there’s some events I’ll always do. Marc Vetry in Philadelphia has an event called Alex’s Lemonade Stand, that’s just a wonderful event, and I did it three years ago for the first time and told him I’ll do it every year. I do my own event for Children of Bellevue every year. I sit on the board of Children of Bellevue. I just joined the advisory board of Happy Baby. Q: What is that? Colicchio: It’s an organic baby food company, and it’s a really great company. Q: What do you feed your children? Colicchio: I have to say my wife does a great job of—I would say 90 percent of what my son Luka eats is organic, and we cook at home for him. He eats what we eat. Q: I am always amazed at these lines of baby food that come out, because I made my baby food, not because I was a lunatic about it, but because I was living in England and you went into the stores and the baby food was so full of cereal, so basically I just chopped up and blended what we were eating. Colicchio: Purées, yes. We started out, somebody gave us this cooker. It’s an all-in-one thing that actually steams the vegetables and then it purees it right in the same—it was really easy. But then once we sort of got him past the purée period, we would just chop up what we were eating really fine. That’s it. Now he eats everything. He loves broccoli, asks for broccoli. It’s his favorite thing to eat. Eats spicy food. Doesn’t matter. It’s great to watch him. It eventually will change and they go through this period where they won’t eat green stuff, whatever. Q: Maybe not. Colicchio: Who knows? Usually it’s when they go to school and their friends start saying, “That’s icky.” But he’s a great eater. The little guy gets mother’s milk and that’s it. Q: I have noticed your involvement in food stamps and school lunches and childhood hunger. When did that start, your activity there? Colicchio: It’s kind of always been like that. Again, not me, but our industry really sort of rallies around hunger issues. It’s just natural for us. I think Billy Shore started that with SOS [Share Our Strength]. SOS was really one of the first organizations to come in and really coalesce behind chefs, and since then it’s become—I think, again, because we feed so many people who are coming to our restaurant and are spending money, but I think that at some level you’ve got to believe that people have a right to eat nutritious food. For years, twenty or thirty years, as long as I’ve been cooking, whether it’s doing events for Meals on Wheels, God’s Love We Deliver, Food Bank of New York, City Harvest, SOS, we’re doing these events and raising money, and the problem is just getting worse. These organizations all do great work, so you’ve got to look at this problem and say this is a systemic problem with what we’re doing in this country. There’s no food policy in this country. There’s farm policy. There’s no food policy. My wife, actually, and her partner, Kristi Jacobson, who was the one who came to me and said, “Tom, I’m thinking of doing this film on hunger. What do you think?” Q: I was going to ask you about that. Colicchio: I figured that’s where we were going. Q: Well, actually, I want to ask you about testifying before Congress too. Colicchio: That’s all part of it. Q: How so? Colicchio: We shot that, actually, for a film. It’s not how it came about, but it was convenient that we were shooting at the same time. What happened is through various organizations as we were doing the film, this one organization, FRAC [Food Research and Action Center], they set up lobbying days, because there’s a group of people out there that believe the government can fix this problem, and I know right now a lot of people think government is the problem, but government should fix this problem. We’re the only industrialized country who doesn’t feed their poor. Because of raising money for so many organizations for so long, the charity model doesn’t work. Q: Tell me what you mean by that. Colicchio: Well, the idea of this charity model where you have to go out as an organization and raise money through doing events or trying to raise money for charity to run your food pantry, it doesn’t work, and it shouldn’t have to work. All those organizations, if government takes more of a role, they’ll still need to be there, but government should be funding these organizations. But, also, if you look at the way food is produced in this country and what we subsidize, when you’re subsidizing corn, wheat, and soy, all the things that go into fast food or highly processed foods to make them cheap, and you’re not subsidizing fruits and vegetables, so when you go into a fast-food place, a burger costs less money than a peach. It shouldn’t happen, and it’s kind of crazy when you think about it. So government needs to sort of look at this. It’s a very cynical look at this, but if you looked and said if government was trying to kill off a population of people, they would subsidize these ingredients, turn them into highly processed food, and they would die of heart disease and obesity and diabetes. If you look at the rates of all this stuff, obesity, there’s a much higher instance in the inner city than anywhere else. So we’ve got to wake up and say, “These are the not the things that we should be subsidizing.” We’re basically subsidizing a whole industry, and that’s why it’s cheaper. That’s why people use it. It’s very easy for people to blame parents. “Well, they’re letting them eat this stuff.” Well, if you have a hard time and you’re struggling putting food on a table, it’s a lot cheaper to walk into a fast-food place and buy a burger and fries and a sweetened drink that provides very little nourishment and a lot of fat and sugar, than it is to put a nutritious meal on the table. I mean, especially when you’re working two or three jobs trying to make ends meet, when do you have time to come home and cook? But, yes, you can’t put fresh fruits and vegetables. They cost too much money. So government can step up and stop subsidizing that stuff and start subsidizing food, real food, or just stop subsidizing other stuff, and farmers can create more of a marketplace for farmers. That’s why, if you look at school lunch, if there was a mandate that a certain amount of food in school lunch had to be fresh organic produce—forget organic for a second, just fresh produce, you’d create more of a market for those farmers so the prices would come down. But if you go to a Greenmarket, you know, the Greenmarkets we have here in New York City, it’s expensive, but that’s the real cost of food. Q: I think most people don’t realize that. They don’t realize that other countries, people pay more for their food. I didn’t realize until the last farm bill, when I had to cover it, that the way that fruits and vegetables are referred to in the farm bill is under this specialty-crop designation, as though it were something exotic. Weird. Colicchio: It’s crazy. Q: As opposed to what we should be eating all the time. 
Colicchio: Right. So FRAC, they set up a lobbying day. Q: FRAC is? Colicchio: Food Research Action [Center], I believe. So they asked me if I would be interested in coming down and testifying, and I said, “Sure. Why not.” Actually, my wife really put this piece together that I delivered. It was interesting to see how it all works, because then, obviously, I stayed very close to what was going on and what happened to that bill that was originally in the House and the president asked for 10 billion dollars over ten years that got watered down to 8 billion in the House, and then 4 and a half billion in the Senate. Then they decided to take 2 and a half billion to fund that from SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], which is crazy. Q: Again, a new word that really means something else. Colicchio: Yes. But watching that process, and then I went to the signing of the bill. The president signed it at a public school in Washington, and I went down for the signing. It was just interesting to watch the process, but testifying was interesting. Q: Did people feel familiar with you because— Colicchio: Some, yes. Q: How did that show itself? Colicchio: Afterwards, I took pictures and things like that. And I talked about the idea that I’m a celebrity and that’s why people will listen. But it was interesting, watching the process, but in the end, I think so many of us were disappointed by the final outcome of that bill, really disappointed, because the real number, if you talk to some experts, they say 40 billion dollars would fix the problem, and 4 billion is just putting another Band-aid on it. But I think the problem with school lunches, there’s a great book by a woman named Janet Poppendieck, who wrote a book called Free For All. She makes a great case, but if you look at the way the argument is always couched for school lunch, it’s always about free lunch and taking care of people who can’t afford lunch, where the three-tired system, the free, the reduced, and the full price, it’s all subsidized. The full price is subsidized too. So why aren’t parents who are sending their kids to public school, who are paying for the full lunch, why aren’t they complaining about the quality of the food in that lunchroom? Everybody should be complaining about it. It’s shocking how bad it is. Q: At the Washington Post, there are periods of time when people are asked to various charitable things, and one of the things that I got involved with doing was going to read with children at a local public school during their lunch period, and what shocked me wasn’t the food; it was the way it came. They didn’t have a kitchen, and so everything was in plastic. So, for example, if you had a hamburger, the meat would be in plastic, separately the bun would be in plastic, the condiments would be in plastic. Colicchio: Disgusting. Q: Making it very easy to throw away, actually, as well as eat. I thought, god, I understood why, if you don’t have a cafeteria, why that happens, but— Colicchio: But they don’t have a cafeteria because they sold all the equipment and got rid of it. They didn’t want cafeterias. This is going back to the eighties where all that got gutted. In 1968, I think it was, CBS, Edward R. Murrow and Charles Kuralt did a documentary called Hunger in America. Our film is not going to be called Hungry in America, by the way; that’s just a working title. At some point they showed a kid dying in the hospital, and they pulled back the camera and they said, “This isn’t a Third World country; this is America.” It was in West Virginia. And people were up in arms. They couldn’t believe that this was happening in the greatest country in the world. Very quickly, Senator [Robert J.] Dole and [George] McGovern sponsored bills. They created the food safety net, pretty much eliminated hunger, until the eighties and the ideology changed, and that’s when all those programs were gutted. That’s when everything started changing again. So, again, there was a political solution to hunger once before, and there could be one again. The political climate right now, nothing’s going to happen, although I think the farm bill, I see all subsidies ending, I really do, because I think a lot of that’s going to get cut out, because if you’re going to start cutting, well, why are we cutting there? Corn’s at an all-time high right now, so why are we subsidizing it? It’s like gas. Why are we subsidizing gas companies? Same thing is going to come out, and I think they’re going to lose some of those subsidies. But we’ll see. That’s on both sides of the aisle. If you don’t think Tom Harkin’s fighting for subsidies for his constituency in Iowa, you’re kidding yourself. Q: That tends to be according to the state you represent, as opposed to the political party. Colicchio: Yes, that’s right. Q: Is the film that you’re working with a full-length film? Colicchio: Yes. Q: For television, for movies, for what? Colicchio: We hope it has theatrical release. We’re doing it with Participant Media. They did Inconvenient Truth and they did The Cove and Waiting for Superman, so it’s well financed. The great thing about Participant, what they do besides just financing the film, they finance a huge outreach program that goes along with the film. They’re a very socially minded company. They’re a great partner to have. It will open up in one of the festivals, probably Toronto in September, and then from there, they’ll look for a sale, whether it’s theatrical or HBO or something. That’s where it’ll end up. Q: The role that you and your wife have in this is what? Colicchio: I’m executive producer, which means absolutely nothing. Very early on, I funded a little bit until we got partners. My wife is directing, producing and directing with her partner, Kristi Jacobson, so they’re both producer/directors. Q: In the various things I’ve read about you, it describes things that you do, like play the guitar, box, and things like that. Do you have time for any of that? Colicchio: I make time. I’m up at six in the morning with my son, and somewhere between like seven o’clock and eight o’clock, I’ll pick up the guitar and play for an hour, and I’ll play when I go home. So when I go home tonight after work, I’ll play for an hour or so, usually just sitting there on the couch, just noodling around with my guitar, playing. Boxing three days a week, if I’m in town, ten o’clock in the morning. I’m home by twelve and showered and at work. Q: You do it at a gym? Colicchio: Yes, a boxing gym. I fish as much as I can. I almost never go out to eat. I just don’t. Q: I can’t figure out when you can eat. Colicchio: You know when I eat? If I’m in the restaurant, we have family meal twice a day, and that’s when I eat, or I eat when I go home. Tonight I’m not sure where I’m eating. We have a house on the North Fork of Long Island so I’m going to go out there tonight. But I don’t go out to restaurants often. I actually need to start going out more, since I enjoy it, but it’s hard to make plans. Q: When was the last time you regularly shopped? Colicchio: For food? Q: Yes. Colicchio: We do a lot of our shopping online for the house. Fresh Direct is great. I was shopping probably last week over at Chelsea Market. Yes, shopping last weekend, I think it was. I lead a very normal life. That’s what’s amazing, is that I wake up in the morning with the kids and I brew a pot of coffee and watch MSNBC until [unclear] starts at eight o’clock, and then I sort of get on with my day. It’s funny, sometimes people have this idea you’re sitting on a beach somewhere with someone fixing me cocktails all day long, and that’s my life. No, that’s not it. Still working. [laughs] Q: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you would want people to know about you or your life, that we haven’t covered so far? There must be something. Colicchio: I don’t know. We covered a lot. I love to fish. Fishing season’s starting up. Going tomorrow. Q: Where will you fish? Colicchio: Tomorrow, out on Long Island. Actually, I’m fishing Saturday. Tomorrow’s Friday. But that’s my passion, is being on the water. Absolutely love it. But, no, I lead a fairly boring life. [laughs] Q: Any new projects, new seasons of— Colicchio: We start shooting in July. I don’t think we’re airing until November. Q: Has it been announced where that will be? Colicchio: No. [laughs] There’s certain things I can’t announce. That’s up to Bravo. We have to keep a lid on it, too, because it’s so popular now, people try to figure out where we’re shooting. We’ve had people who camp out, like, in Chicago. We had a photographer camp out. Q: Groupies. Colicchio: Well, they’ll camp out, and what they’ll try to do is try to figure out who’s getting eliminated from the show, based who’s coming in and out of the house. So we have ways to sort of throw people off. If you’re eliminated from the show, you don’t go home. You stay. You’re just off camera, but you’re still around. Because it’s gotten crazy. I love watching the people when they’re like, “Oh, I’m looking at this photo. I know this person won because of this and this and this.” And you laugh and go, “You’re so wrong.” It’s like, “Come on. Like we’re that dumb?” Q: How long can you keep this up, do you think? Colicchio: I don’t know. It all depends on the rating, obviously. I don’t know. I’m on for another two seasons at least. My wife and I are working on something scripted, not for me to be in, but a scripted show based on the restaurant. If we’ll sell that, it would be great. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else. I think that’s about it. Q: Thank you very much. This is great. Thank you. Colicchio: Thanks. [End of interview] Colicchio – 2 - PAGE 45