Welcome Back Rocco

- Been re-watching the Rocco DiSpirito reality show “The Restaurant.” Can there be more of a clusterfuck than this fucking place? Who’s this wait staff, the cast of Ben-Hur? Christ. And I’m sorry, but they’re only meatballs…I’m sure they’re great, but how “amazing” can Mama’s meatballs be? Camon. - XMASTIME

Back when there was a food channel that actually taught people how to cook food, Rocco DiSpirito showed me how to make a great meat loaf. And I was mesmerized by what a shitshow that reality show of his opening a restaurant was, so much that rarely does a year go by without watching it again (oh shit now I probably will tonight.) Two years ago, I wondered if we were ever gonna get an oral history of what a fucking car crash the show was.

Mostly, like everybody else, whenever his name came up I'd wonder whatever the fuck had happened to him. And now, after so many years, he's back:

For more than a decade, the same question has followed the celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito: What happened? Is he, as some have posited, “a supernaturally talented chef who squandered his gifts in the scattershot pursuit of fame?” Is he possibly still “the most talented American chef alive at this very moment?” Or is he simply “obsessed with becoming famous?”

Not only is he back - he's back in the kitchen:

But here he is, cooking in a professional kitchen for the first time in a decade and a half, and now there’s a new question that follows him: Will he be able to reclaim his former glory, or will the detractors who wrote him off during his 15-year hiatus turn out to be correct?

“I cook every night on the line, and pick up two or three menu items,” DiSpirito says. “A few things, like the risotto, I won’t let anyone touch,” he says, noting that “it feels great” to be on the line again. “I do hope to cook enough of the food I was known for, so that people who are looking for that find it,” DiSpirito says of his approach to the menu. “But the way I cook has fundamentally changed. It’s not me trying to recreate what I did at Union Pacific, except maybe in small doses.”

I could never get a grip on whether he was a camera-hogging diva or a well-meaning guy who was sometimes too much of a softie with his staff, which is my way of saying of COURSE I'm watching all 6 hours of The Restaurant tonight!!!!