My Dinner With Tom Colicchio: New In GQ

I got to eat the winning Restaurant Wars menu from Top Chef and interviewed Tom Colicchio.

The short version:

• New piece in GQ! I’ll tell you all about it below.

• New podcasts! We’ve got a new Frotcast about HBO’s The Idol, and early subscriber access to the latest Pod Yourself The Wire (aka Pod Yourself A Gun: The Wire) with Sofiya Alexandra.

The longer version:

Sometimes I get invited to cool stuff. For instance, a few weeks back, I got to attend a Top Chef event in which the winners of this year’s Restaurant Wars — Team “United Kitchen,” Amar, Sara, Ali, and Buddha — served their winning menu at Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurant in Century City.

My wife was supposed to go with me and we even had a babysitter all set up for a nice night in LA, but then she got mono so I ended up taking Joey Devine from Roundball Rock instead. Which was great, because Joey Devine is maybe the only guy on Earth who follows Top Chef more religiously than I do.

We got to the event and quickly realized that not being bigger starfuckers is probably a big factor in why we’re not more successful. Whenever Top Chef people would walk out into the dining room, everyone there would swarm them, generally doing the LA thing of scanning the room for more important people while they’re talking to you. At one point, Amar Santana, who I made an Uproxx video with a few years back and who I still DM with from time to time about food and kid stuff, came over to talk to me and Joey. A crowd of about six people immediately rushed over and all but elbowed us out of the way, literally interrupting Amar mid-sentence. Wild stuff.

On the plus side, our lack of “networking” drive meant we mostly hung out near the bar before the dinner, standing very near the path for waiters returning to the kitchen. Meaning they always came to us to finish off the last couple hors d'oeuvres (God I hate typing that word) they needed to dump before refilling their plates. I think we ate about 15 caviar-covered mini blini. They were really good.

Before the dinner I got about 15 minutes to interview Tom. Right before the event, my editor at GQ and I had decided, after a bit of debate, to try for Tom rather than Padma or Gail (all of whom I’ve interviewed before and found delightful). That turned out to be a good thing, since Padma ended up being a no-show on the night (perhaps foreshadowing her announcement that she’s leaving the show late last week).

As I wrote in the GQ piece, Tom is kind of an intimidating guy. He does kind of the opposite of “yes-and” where he furrows his brow and makes you feel like a bit of an idiot for asking whatever you’ve just asked before you justify it (my previous interview with him was over the phone so I hadn’t faced this issue). It’s very New York of him and I had sort of PTSD flashbacks to my time living there (with New Yorkers I found that they’d be kind of rude to you, and you’d have to be a little rude back at first and after that they’d soften up and get nice). Despite the higher degree of difficulty, he’s a more satisfying interview because he’s also straightforward, articulate, candid, and not full of shit, which are rare qualities, especially when you’re used to interviewing movie people.

Once my time was up, I went back to the bar area for more blini and more drinks to try to decompress. The Bravo publicist checked in to say that she’d “put me at a really good table,” which I took to mean that the other people would be, like, funny or something. We lingered a bit longer and when it was time for service to begin, another person told us “you’re at Table 1.”

I took the last seat available at that table, and then looked at the place card next to me:

Of COURSE no one else at the table wanted to sit right next to Tom.

But it turned out he was a perfectly pleasant dining guest, even when being peppered with somewhat intense questions like “where is the best place for Chinese food in the East Village!”

Some of my favorite bits were his thoughts on The Bear and The Menu (see GQ headline), the fact that he basically forgets all the dishes on the show as soon as he eats them, and that the judges basically don’t get to hang out with the contestants on the show at all beyond what you see on camera — a deliberate producer choice.

Remember Buddha’s “tomato tea” from Restaurant Wars that everyone loved? Sounded weird, but yeah, it was bomb. Pungeant, savory, and somehow simultaneously hearty and refreshing. Tom said something like “you know, chefs have been trying to push ‘tomato water’ for like 15 years now, the only innovation here was to heat it up. But it was a really good idea.”

Absolute chef’s kiss of a back-handed Colicchio comment, and perfectly on brand that he was also correct.

The rest of Buddha’s “deconstructed English breakfast” was also pretty stellar. I questioned that he didn’t have beans in it, but there was actually a pea puree on that toast underneath the prosciutto which technically qualifies. Arguably didn’t add much (toast with prosciutto was delicious already) but it was just enough to prove that he didn’t cop out on the beans, which is basically what makes Buddha Buddha.

Amar’s cold scallops with warm butter sauce — agreed again that it didn’t taste as weird as it sounds. Scallops are one of the only foods in existence that I actually don’t generally enjoy, but I ate all of this. It was much more acidic than I imagined, but the texture between the pickled veg, crunchy little potato balls, scallops, and sauce was really great, and it was a balanced bite when you got everything at once.

Sara’s cullen skink: honestly amazing. Smoky sauce, tender fish, a perfectly cooked unshelled mussel that somehow stayed moist (fucking wizardry), plus bacon bits and tiny tender potatoes. Not lying when I said Tom licked sauce off his finger.

Ali’s lamb: probably the weak point of the menu, if I’m being honest. The texture of the lamb was inconsistent, though the freekeh on the side was unbelievably flavorful and the “cornish pasty” on the side I probably could’ve eaten 10 of, easily. Ali is also just as handsome in person, arguably more so.

The “basil ice cream” didn’t taste that basil-y to me, kind of more like green tea ice cream, but that could just be my brain inserting the familiar. Otherwise a beautiful, refreshing dessert. No notes.

Final Thoughts: I’d love to give you some incendiary “inside dope” about how the phony food on Hollyweird’s fake food show REALLY tastes, but the truth is, most of the criticism I remember from the episode was pretty accurate to what I tasted. It mainly ranged from decent-but-not-mind-blowing to actually mind-blowing. Both Buddha’s breakfast and Sara’s stew (?) were the standouts. I wouldn’t want to have to choose; I’d probably just default to whoever gave me the biggest portion.