Rocco DiSpirito can’t stay away from reality TV. The New York chef will devote his culinary expertise to Bravo’s new series, Rocco’s Dinner Party, which gives three contestants a shot at creating a memorable evening for DiSpirito and a few celebrity guests. The winner gets a cool $20,000.
We caught up with former star of Rocco Gets Real and The Restaurant, 44, on a recent conference call:
Where did the idea for your show come from?
I love to entertain. I love cooking for people. To this day, one of my favorite things to do is to take out a cutting board, chop some onions, talk to my friends, put something together, bring it to the table, and enjoy that moment. That really human, wonderful connection that you get when you sit at a table and you eat and drink, because there’s something about the intimacy of a table that breaks down barriers. People let their guard down, they talk, they open up, and you can really connect.
As a frequent guest judge on Top Chef , have you thought about being a head judge of a cooking competition for a while?
I loved being on Top Chef. They do such a good a good job of balancing — honoring the craft of cooking while making great entertainment for television, which is not easy to do, as I know personally. And it felt like a real privilege to be able to sit there with Tom Colicchio and all the other judges and talk to those guys, talk to the contestants about the food, and offer them insight. Bravo and I have been looking for a project that we could work on together and the idea does come from my real fondness for entertaining at home. I got out of the professional restaurant business in 2005 and I’m a home cook now.
Can you go over some of the celebrities that we can look forward to seeing on the show?
In the first episode there’s Bryan Batt from Mad Men, Michael Kenneth Williams from Boardwalk Empire, Christine Ebersole. It’s really an amazing group. And what’s really interesting is that we’re looking for people who are fun who love food and wine. People who didn’t necessarily know about food and wine and represented different worlds, different places in our culture, so not just people who are famous, but who were experts in something.
How is this show different from all the others out there?
What most culinary competitions do is focus on, the how, the culinary part of cooking, the technique, the ingredients, the passion of the chefs, and this show is entirely focused on why we get together and cook. The reason we cook is because we want people to know we care for them, we love them, they matter to us, and we want to celebrate and we want to have real human moments with them around the dinner table.
Did you have a favorite dinner party?
There’s no question that the Liza Minnelli dinner party is sort of otherworldly. Picture me, a chef sitting at a table with Marvin Hamlisch, Liza, Sandra Bernhard, some of the greatest entertainers of our time and hearing stories like, “My Godfather was Ira Gershwin and he told me a story,” you know? I had to pinch myself a few times. She revealed a lot about her father and talked a lot about her life and watching this woman who’s celebrating her 65th birthday who has more energy than I do, feel so thrilled about what was happening that she had to sing and get up and dance. It was just a really wonderful night.
Madeleine Marr
Premiere airdate is 11 p.m. Wednesday. On June 22, the series will move to 10 p.m. Wednesdays.
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