Bobby Flay: Chapter One

Introduction

The word “chapter” has so many meanings. It reminds me of my early grammar school days, when I had a hard time getting through any book I read, regardless of whether it was something I was interested in or just another book from my summer reading list. As I trudged slowly through the words, sentences, and then the paragraphs that would somehow get me to the end, I’d count each chapter I finished like it was a badge of honor. I didn’t know it then, but looking back, this was a sure sign of the learning or reading disability that is a block for me even today. Back in the 1970s, we weren’t testing kids every ten minutes to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses, but I’m convinced that my inability to get through a book—any book—shaped the way I learn.

From fourth grade on, my grades were atrocious. This was attributed to many things by different people. My teachers whispered that it was because I lived in a single-parent household (my parents had separated when I was five or six years old). You know, the stereotypical “Bobby’s struggling emotionally, so he’s having a hard time focusing on his schoolwork. He has plenty of potential, we just need him to apply himself.” I heard that at the end of every semester of grammar school, as I failed subject after subject. It wasn’t that my work was bad—I just didn’t do any. I couldn’t get started. I almost never did homework.

Others blamed my academic struggles on my keen interest in sports, which I always excelled at. In baseball, I could play any position on the field, and I could shoot hoops with anyone in my neighborhood or class. I had game—just not with my textbooks. “Maybe we should take sports away from him so he can concentrate on his schoolwork.” Another great idea. Take away the one thing I loved doing so I could focus more on the thing I despised: studying.

I struggled every day in school, up through my first year in high school, when, surprisingly, I was granted admission to Xavier, a very academic high school in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, which my father had attended. To this day, I’m not sure how I got in. It definitely wasn’t my grades or my not-so-polished fourteen-year-old charm. For whatever reason, I decided to go. After a disagreement with the basketball coach during tryouts, I decided to run track and cross country instead. I became a long-distance runner and was highly ranked among all five boroughs of New York City. I’m sure my athleticism helped get me through the year without being tossed out—plus, I was getting racetrack tips from a “neighborhood guy” and relaying them to one of my teachers who liked to bet horses way more than he liked to teach social studies. That didn’t hurt, either.

During the summer before tenth grade, I intercepted a letter in our mailbox at home notifying me that I was not going to be invited back for my sophomore year. I told my father that I wanted to switch schools. He immediately looked me up and down and said, “You got thrown out, didn’t you?”

I won’t bore you with the details of the rest of my high school career. It was brief. I was granted a last chance at Xavier at the start of my sophomore year and failed out after the first semester. I was invited to attend a rival school called La Salle Academy that really cared about their sports program. The track coach knew me from schooling his kids on the track and basically guaranteed my admission. I tried that for a couple of months before finally deciding to drop out for good. On my terms. I realized that learning through the moments of life right in front of me was going to be the schooling I needed to get through adulthood with success and happiness. School was in my rearview mirror. That chapter was finally over. And that’s when Chapter One really began.

My father helped me get a job filling in as a busboy for two weeks at a Broadway theater restaurant called Joe Allen. When the full-time busboy returned, I was ushered out, but as I was about to leave the restaurant, the chef called out to me.

“Would you like a job in the kitchen?” I heard from a distance. With one foot literally out the front door, I spun around and, without much enthusiasm, responded, “Sure.”

That particular moment changed the course of my life. Without it, would I have wound up in kitchens for the next forty years? Maybe, but who knows. At that moment, it was an opportunity to make $190 a week. I had no clue it was the first step in my journey to becoming a cook, chef, and restaurateur. 

I’m not going to use this valuable space to recount my restaurant projects, my cookbook publishing, or even my media experiences. More important is that up to now, my cooking life has given me the opportunity to learn in a way that makes sense only to me. I use my skills in the kitchen to speak languages that I do not speak, to learn about people and their cultures through their ingredients and their cooking.

I’m certainly not the first person to make paella, one of the world’s great dishes. But every day, somebody, somewhere, is inspired by paella and dreams up a new version of, or approach to, the dish. I created a paella with black kale, wild mushrooms, crispy artichokes, and saffron that became a staple at Gato. If you look closely, there’s a steamed egg in the middle of it. When mixed into the rice and vegetables, the egg fortifies the dish with a richness that reminds me of another great rice dish, this one from Korea: bibimbap. It’s a result of me being a fan of these dishes and being inspired by one component or another. When I’m creating dishes for a restaurant menu, I dig into my flavor recall, most of the time subconsciously. If I hadn’t been excited by experiencing those dishes as cooked by someone else, my own renditions would not be possible.

It goes back to my way of learning. Not through textbooks, but through life and the experiences life gives me. I’ll let the results on these pages speak for themselves. I’ve cooked every day of my life for the last three decades, and created hundreds, probably more than a thousand, dishes. The one hundred you’ll find in this book were chosen because they were important to the restaurants they were served in—important to me, the cooks, the customers, and sometimes even the critics. In the case of the dishes I’ve curated from my Iron Chef appearances, they stood out as recipes I’m still excited to eat and cook, even if they’re crazy and something I came up with on the fly. Some of the dishes are fan favorites—from Iron Chef, or from my restaurants—but when I was coming up with the recipe list, I tried not to worry too much about what I thought people would be looking for. Instead, I tried to pick dishes that would make readers feel something. Happiness, nostalgia, curiosity, excitement—these dishes should take you on an emotional journey. When you start flipping through the book, you’ll notice that the recipes are not organized chronologically, so you might find a dish from my first restaurant, Mesa Grill, next to a dish from Shark in Las Vegas, which I opened nearly thirty years later. But I like to see foods from different eras of my life intermingling on the pages of this book. It’s a nice reminder that the best cooking stands the test of time.

The first chapter of my career has been an exciting and raucous one, and anyone who knows me well understands that I never stop looking for my next round of inspiration at the stove.

Enjoy Chapter One. I’m just getting started.

—Bobby Flay