AS Seen On TV

It is impossible that anyone could be this hard to get ahold of. I don’t care how busy or famous you are. I have left at least seven voicemails and as many emails in as many hours. Finally, I get a text message from Chef Cliff Crooks: “No verbal communication at this juncture. How can I assist you?”

Is this guy for real?

We are talking about Cliff Crooks, executive sous-chef at Blue Water Grill in Union Square. Chefs work a lot— I get it. And Crooks is kind of a celebrity: He competed but didn’t win on the second season of Bravo TV’s Top Chef. He claims he wants to do this interview. He keeps telling me he wants to do this story. But somehow, despite his insistence that he checks his email and text messages religiously, he never seems to find the time to call me back.

Responding to his first text, I tell him to meet me at City Bakery at 9 a.m. the next day. An hour or two later, I get a text from him: “I will be there.” But will he?

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Chef Crooks is a 30-year-old man somewhere on the journey toward achieving his ultimate goal: to be a successful chef and restaurateur in the New York City area. His story starts out like so many others: He accidentally became a cook, showed talent and began doggedly pursuing success. He dutifully works more hours than any of his cooks. But pursuing the career of an executive chef in New York City today is not the freewheeling game it once was; and Crooks, like many of his peers, is just trying to stay in it, while expecting that he will come out on top.

It might have been the day Julia Child dropped a potato pancake on her television show, picked it up and said, “You just scoop it back into the pan. Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you.” Or when Anthony Bourdain told readers of his best-selling “Kitchen Confidential” never to eat fish on a Monday. Or, God forbid, it was when Emeril Lagasse shouted on live television, “Let’s kick it up a notch!” Whenever the moment was—that moment when chefs became people, if slightly superhuman—it has happened, and today’s up-and-comers must now figure out how to integrate this dimension (personality) to the benefit of their work. “Everything is different than when I was coming up,” says Tom Colicchio, owner of Craft Restaurants and head judge on Bravo’s Top Chef, a hugely successful cooking competition on Bravo for aspiring chefs. It’s where Crooks competed two years ago on the show’s second season and vaulted to instant—if temporary—fame. “The overall awareness of the media is changing. It’s no longer enough to just be a good cook—you have to have personality too,” Colicchio says.

And Crooks has personality, in large measure. He is a good-looking, sturdy Panamanian chef with a memorable name and a cocksure attitude that betrays his intelligence. (“I am extremely cocky but not arrogant,” he says. “I don’t think my shit doesn’t stink.”) At 28, as executive chef at Saluté in midtown Manhattan, Crooks was cast on Top Chef, which has been nominated for two Emmys in reality television categories and two James Beard Awards in “Television Food Show” categories. On the show in 2006, the fans loved Crooks because he was confident and headstrong, but at times he appeared humble and funny.

Bravo casting director Nick Gilhool discovered Crooks among the show’s applicants and says, “Cliff was one of the popular ones. For every cast, there are fan favorites, and he was one.” Gilhool says that every season of Top Chef is cast with a balance of personality types. “There is always the diva, always the cute nerdy guy, the hunk and the people you love to hate,” he explains. When I ask Crooks which character he was, he says, “I don’t know, the black chef?” Fans considered Crooks one of the stronger chefs in the competition, and he narrowly missed the finals in Hawaii when the show’s producers asked Colicchio to get rid of him for assaulting another competitor.

Unlike Colicchio and his contemporaries, Crooks is famous for something that has very little to do with cooking or even being a chef at all. Crooks acknowledges (though not readily) that people will always know him as that guy from Top Chef, but he certainly doesn’t act like the show gave him an edge in his career; he says he works just as hard now as he did prior to his Top Chef experience. Crooks says that his bosses at Salute didn’t think he would come back to the restaurant afterward. Crooks went straight to Salute after getting off the plane from Los Angeles. “I literally didn’t sleep or drop off my stuff,” he says.

Crooks says that fame did bombard him after the show. “Business at Salute increased by 30 percent,” he claims, and he says he was approached with multiple investment offers to back his own restaurant. He now plans to open his restaurant with the same investors he found before the show. In the end, he doesn’t think Top Chef will have a serious impact on his career. “If it helps me, great,” he says. “I don’t think it will hurt.”

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In today’s culinary world, if you write well, you can be Bourdain. If you have a schtick and raw magnetism, you can wear Mario Batali’s orange crocs. If you have sex appeal, you can be Eric Ripert or David Bouley (or a few others). Still, Colicchio warns, these chefs were cooks before—not after—they became people we knew. Chefs that are now household names like Ripert, Batali, Emeril Lagasse and Colicchio began in the kitchen. In fact, they reached pinnacles in their restaurant careers with New York Times stars and James Beard Awards. It was only after these accolades that these chefs turned to television, books and barbecue sauces.

“The idea of television wasn’t part of the equation 25 years ago,” Colicchio says. “Now you have students coming out of culinary school and that is what they aspire to.” Colicchio believes that the media presence in the industry today can steer chefs in the wrong direction. “There is so much media attention that all food stars start to look the same,” he says.

That’s why a show like Top Chef is so popular. The competitive aspect helps viewers distinguish and keep track of the “chef-testants,” but so much of the show is a parade of the chefs’ personalities. On Iron Chef America, another popular cooking competition show, factors like personality and how chefs relate to one another are almost undetectable. On Top Chef, which was created by the Magical Elves production company (the same group that created Bravo’s hit fashion reality show, Project Runway), characters are chosen because of how they interact with one another: It’s more a reality television show about cooking than an unscripted cooking show. How, then, does a “chef-testant” transition back to a “chef”?

With the spotlight on the culinary world, new chefs feel pressure to distinguish themselves—perhaps before they are ready. “What many people don’t realize is that chefs like Ferran Adria, and all the molecular gastronomists, they were traditional chefs first,” Colicchio says. “Lots of young chefs are just jumping in without learning the basics, like how to roast, baste and sauté.” Chefs today are simply not putting in the hours on the line, Colicchio says. “Before, it was normal to work maybe ten years on the line before getting to a sous-chef position.”

Frank Bruni, the New York Times’ restaurant critic, says that the younger generation of workers “approach the world in a more entitled way,” which might explain the rising cost of culinary school and the resulting graduates with mountains of debt. “You have to justify the expense of culinary school,” Bruni says recently, “and if you are training to be a line cook, you won’t be able to.”

Crooks never went to culinary school, though he did think about it. “By the time I got around to thinking about going, all the chefs I was working for told me I already knew everything I would learn there,” he says. He has been cooking just over ten years, and very little of that time has been spent as a line cook. He has worked in New Jersey, Manhattan and Los Angeles, and he’s now at the 500-seat Blue Water Grill, which was number five in Zagat’s most popular New York Restaurant list for 2008.

At 30, Crooks is not the youngest guy in the kitchen. He’s not the oldest guy either, but he’s getting there. “A certain kind of kitchen work is a young person’s game,” says Bruni. “If you don’t get to a certain point—in this career more than in others—you enter a zone where you don’t have the raw human power,” he says. However, the success of a chef relies on a delicate balance between staying young and in the game and being smart enough to know when you’re ready to venture out on your own. “You can have it too young,” says Bruni, who gave Rocco Dispirito as an example. “One gets the sense looking at him, finding the kind of success he has, that he doesn’t know how to handle it at times—it’s like he peaked too early,” he says.

Crooks never had any intention of letting the show or anything else steer his career prematurely. “I had the steps I was going to take,” he says. “Going on the show didn’t change that.”

Those steps are fairly simple: Get smart enough to open multiple restaurants of his own. He wants them to be small—no more than 120 seats (two full MTA busloads)—and “food-driven” with Mediterranean and Italian influences. Blue Water Grill, then, will probably be the last job on a payroll: He told me he’ll have at least one of his own restaurants within three years.

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Getting Crooks to talk at all is not easy; getting him to talk in the morning is painful. The morning we meet at City Bakery near Union Square, I decide to ignore that Crooks is one-and-a-half hours late. As it’s our first interview, I’m just trying to cover the basics, which quickly turns into a question/answer lightning round. Though his answers to my questions are infuriatingly monosyllabic and superficial, he’s speedy about answering them.

Me: Do you cook for your family?

Crooks: Sometimes. My mother cooks.

Me: Why do you live in New Jersey?

Crooks: I like the suburbs.

Me: Why? You don’t dread the commute?

Crooks: I don’t. I have thought about living in the city. But I don’t.

(Later, during a late night interview, Crooks tells me that living in the city would make post-work partying too easy. He also said that he used to be a big party kid and that chefs always ruin themselves by overworking and partying too much. He also said that if he lived in the city, he “would have probably died by now.”)

Me: What is your favorite meal?

Crooks: Martinis and sushi.

Me: Do you want to make a lot of money?

Crooks: That is a weird question. Doesn’t everybody?

Me: You have been known to shirk the fame that Top Chef has brought you. Do you regret going on the show?

Crooks: No.

Me: Do you not like to talk about it?

Crooks: I’ll talk about it. We talked about it last night at dinner with Alex (Ureña) for 20 minutes.

Me: Why did you go on the show?

Crooks: Because it is all about food.

Me: Were you a picky eater as a kid?

Crooks: No. I ate everything. I still do.

Me: What do you do when you’re not at work?

Crooks: I am always at work.

Me: Do you work out?

Crooks: All the time.

Me: When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Crooks: A big red fire truck.

Me: How? How would you go about becoming that?

Crooks: I would figure it out.

In many of our future interactions, I try again and again to get both Crooks or his girlfriend Jadelynn Stahl to acknowledge that this was his way of saying he didn’t like the question, or didn’t have an answer; but both of them insist that a big red fire truck was what he wanted to be. By the end of our time together, I still don’t believe that he really wanted to be a big red fire truck; but I’m becoming convinced that they think this peculiar childhood ambition is true.

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“All chefs are pirates,” Crooks tells me more than once. “We have all broken the law, stolen stuff and otherwise behaved badly. I don’t know why this is, but it is the truth.”

I think about it for a minute and carefully disagree. Maybe all chefs have a pirate streak, or used to be pirates, but Crooks diligently works within the law many countless hours a week, teaching cooks, conceiving dishes and keeping books—hardly the life of a pirate.

Crooks’ pirate observation is personal: He says he used to party a lot but that he’s settled down since then. “Nine out of ten chefs kill themselves, their careers,” Crooks says, sure of his statistic. “They party too much and then have to get up in the morning to go to work.”

It is ironic, then, that Crooks was kicked off Top Chef for a drunken antic that went too far. In the middle of the night, he and his fellow competitors woke up another competitor, Marcel Vigneron, so they could shave his head. They didn’t end up shaving it, but Cliff did hold Marcel in a headlock for a while—a move that was captured on video and seen by the producers at Top Chef. Colicchio’s first reaction to seeing the video was, “Why didn’t someone erase that tape?” He was disappointed to have to eliminate someone from the competition for something other than his cooking, especially since he thought Cliff was a worthy competitor. “He definitely wasn’t going home that day. He would have made it to the finals,” Colicchio says.

While watching the show, Suzanne Korns, the general manager who first hired Crooks as a waiter at Marado Blu in West Caldwell, NJ, says she wasn’t surprised that Crooks was booted off the show. “He has loads of personality,” she says, “but it can go either way.” Crooks was shocked to learn that he had unwittingly broken the rules, but he understood his punishment and, to his credit, Colicchio says, “Crooks looked at me straight and says, ‘You’re right, I messed up,’ and he went home.”

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Crooks says he was a fat kid (“I actually still am—I just hide it better.”), but Korns, who has known him since he was 16, spins it differently: “He was always ripped, like he is now.” It is nothing new for chefs to be attractive to front-of-the-house staff: Their power over the hoodlum cooks in the kitchen and ability to cook smacks many a lip. But Crooks takes it a few steps further. He’s good-looking, yes, but more memorably, he is a flirt. He is a low talker who isn’t afraid of getting close, and he rarely yells at the wait staff, which makes him an instant favorite among them. He loves to have fun, and he certainly isn’t above joking around if the time is right. One night a few months ago, a bar guest complained that the bartender had ignored her because she was black (the bartender had, in fact, ignored her because she was rude and drunk). As a joke, a few black waiters pretended to feel slighted by the bartender, approaching her with questions like, “Are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong?” At one point, someone asked Crooks (the only black guy in the kitchen) if he would play along. He was assured that the bartender wouldn’t get in trouble, so Crooks left the kitchen and entered the bar area, his black skin shining and white coat blinding the darkened bar.

“Is everything all right between us?” He asked her with a concerned but cagey expression. She looked behind her to see who he was talking to before she glimpsed the 30 servers giggling behind him. I don’t know if he even ever found out what the joke was about. He just always wants to get in on it.

In a restaurant-obsessed city like New York, every ingredient, dish or technique has a proscribed lifespan. Take, for example, “blackened” items. Invented and popularized by New Orleans chef Paul Prod’homme in the early 1980s, blackened catfish, shrimp and even steak and chicken began appearing on the hottest and trendiest restaurant menus in New York almost immediately thereafter (often misrepresented as a “200-year old” Cajun cooking technique). But before long, “blackening” wasn’t risky or different anymore, and it became appealing to an entirely different crowd: the “safe” eaters—those who enjoy good comfort food, and theoretically want to try new things, but would generally rather someone else try it first. Someone put blackened shrimp on a Caesar salad (whose trendy heyday was about five years earlier, incidentally), and its “coolness” factor settled comfortably somewhere between the next latest fad and Chicken Parmesan. At Blue Water Grill, one of the most popular items is the blackened swordfish; Crooks thinks “it is a balanced dish that should be taken out and shot—because it is so old.”

For Crooks, food trends are interesting, and he’s constantly poring over food magazines and the dining sections of newspapers. And he’s not afraid to use trends to his advantage. “I will wear a pair of bell bottoms,” he says, “but not every day. I like to use food trends as a vehicle to get you to eat something.” Essentially, if he wants you to try his savory plum sauce—which he does—then he’s willing to slather it all over your Chilean sea bass. He only hopes you realize that you like the dish because of the sauce—not because you’re eating the 30th Chilean sea bass you’ve eaten this year.

Suzanne Korns hired Crooks as a waiter/bartender when he was 16. “Marado Blu was kind of a hotspot back in the day,” she says. Korns remembers having to drag him out of the kitchen and back onto the floor to wait on his guests. “You knew in his heart where he wanted to be,” Korns says. “He was always sneaking back into the kitchen to catch glimpses of what was going on.” Crooks began cooking one slow Sunday night when drinkers at the bar wanted food and his chef, hung over from the previous Saturday, told Crooks to make it himself.  Crooks is a different person in the kitchen. What side of Crooks’ personality you’ll get depends on whether he’s in the kitchen, at a bar, working brunch, with his girlfriend, tired, hungry or if it’s morning. His steadfastness is limited to his work. When I ask him if he’s thought about the possibility of his restaurant failing, he stands firm.

Me: What would you do if it failed?

Crooks: Why would it fail?

Me: I don’t know. Isn’t the statistic something like one in four New York City restaurants fail?

Crooks: Why would it fail?

Me: You just told me you’ve thought about the possibility of it failing. I’m just asking you what you’ve thought about that possibility.

Crooks: Why would it fail?

Me: Grrrr.

Crooks: (smiles)