IN THIS AGE of timesavers, the new cookbook In the Hands of a Chef: Cooking with Jody Adams of Rialto Restaurant (William Morrow) is an anomaly. Forget 10-minute stews and three-ingredient casseroles; Adams’s literary venture aims, according to the book’s jacket, "to make you wish you had more time to spend in the kitchen."
Adams herself knows a little something about spending time in the kitchen, having launched her professional cooking career under local culinary legend Lydia Shire at Seasons restaurant before moving on to Boston hotspots Hamersley’s Bistro and Michela’s. In 1994, Adams and partners Michela Larson and Karen Haskell opened Rialto in Cambridge’s Charles Hotel; in 1997, Adams earned a coveted James Beard Award for Best Chef in the Northeast, and by 2000, Nation’s Restaurant News had inducted Adams and Rialto into its Fine Dining Hall of Fame.
Not everything the partners touch turns to restaurant gold, though: their Chestnut Hill outpost, Red Clay, closed its doors last month after less than three years of operation. But Adams and Co. have plenty to keep them busy, with Rialto continuing to rake in accolades and the recently opened Blu adding to the feeding frenzy.
Q: When did you first know you’d be a chef?
A: I first knew that I was going to be a professional involved in food ... it wasn’t necessarily becoming a chef. When I started out, there weren’t celebrity chefs — that didn’t really exist. There were people like Wolfgang Puck and Jasper [White], who had certainly made significant names for themselves, but it was a different kind of recognition, I think, than now. I had thought I was going to be a nurse, so I was taking classes, and I was working in a nursing home, and I had the great fortune of getting a job in a small gourmet-food store in Tiverton, Rhode Island, called Provender. And the first day that I walked in there, I remember this feeling of walking in and getting behind the counter and working with cheeses and breads and things like that, and I knew I was home. I knew that’s where I was supposed to be.
Q: Do you ever wish you could go back to just being a chef, and not being a restaurateur as well?
A: I sometimes wish I could just go back to being a line cook. I loved being a line cook. Your focus is on the food and the moment. You work with a team of people. It’s very physical, but it’s a very tight little dance that you do, behind the line. You develop relationships with people and ways of communicating that don’t involve language; you know, you can’t always talk about what needs to be done — you just sort of know. It’s very immediate: you make a beautiful plate, you send it out to a customer, and they enjoy it. And then at the end of the night it’s over, you wrap everything up, and you go home. That’s it. I loved that! And so, yes, I definitely miss that. However, I do like stepping back and seeing the bigger picture, and being a restaurant owner and having partners — we are able to do all kinds of things that I couldn’t do by myself.
Q: How do you manage your time?
A: I think you have to think ahead, all the time, and to a certain extent live in the future. And prioritize. It’s getting rid of the things in your life that aren’t as important. I can set my schedule, and determine that I’m going to spend a certain amount of time with my children, and be at home certain nights. I have a fabulous staff. You know, one of the challenges of becoming a professional chef is figuring out how to delegate and let go a little bit and teach and train, so that you have a very strong staff, and you have sous-chefs who care as much as you do, and you know that you can walk away and they are going to do what you would be doing. And I think that I have successfully done that, because I know that I have a terrific staff.
Q: Why a cookbook? Is this something you’ve wanted to do for a long time?
A: I’ve been cooking for a long time, and I’ve taught a lot of classes over the years, first at Michela’s, at Rialto, BU, places like that. And we have a customer base that has longevity; they’re people that have been coming back for years and years and years. And there were a lot of requests for a book. So I had this collection of recipes, and I felt like I wanted to put it all together. And also my partners encouraged me — there was just an enormous amount of encouragement to do this. I happen to live with and be married to a writer, so it all made sense. We’ve been together for a long time, so he knows a lot about where my inspirations come from. So all of it made a lot of sense; it was the right time to do it.
Q: The book jacket says the book is "intended to make you wish you had more time to spend in the kitchen." So it’s not geared toward people who are sort of cooking on the fly, who don’t have that much time to spend in the kitchen?
A: It’s definitely not a one-two-three, you can do this in a half an hour, put it on the table kind of book. This is a book for people who like to spend time in the kitchen, who like to cook, who like to put some time in. Now, not every recipe takes an extended amount of time; some of them are quite quick. But I want to get people to really focus on how enjoyable it is, not only the finished product, but also the whole process of cooking, and think about what it is that draws people into the kitchen. Why is it, for instance — and I’m sure you’ve had this experience — if you have a party, whatever kind of party it is, everybody ends up in the kitchen. It’s a comfortable place, it’s a familiar place, it’s where good things have happened in people’s lives, for the most part.
Q: Do you aspire to have a show on the Food Network?
A: I love to instruct, and I love the idea of reaching a lot of people, and the television that I have done has been a whole lot of fun. If all the forces came together and I was asked to do a television show, I certainly would consider it. It’s something that I enjoy doing, because it’s about instruction and reaching people, and I think that, historically, it works. Julia Child certainly is the example of someone who opened doors for people and made the idea of cooking in a French culinary tradition accessible to a huge population, which was a wonderful thing. I love what the Food Network and all of the PBS shows have done for cooking, because I think that it takes people back into the kitchen in a way that had sort of started to disappear from people’s lives.
Q: How do you feel about vegetarians? I know some chefs have a disdain for them.
A: Oh God, no! I think that people choose to eat in particular ways for various reasons, and I think that our bodies are much more complex than just what you put in your mouth. There are things that make people uncomfortable. There are some people whose body make-up and their lifestyle and their sort of spiritual focus determine that there are certain things that they don’t eat; it’s not comfortable for them, for one reason or another, just as someone who’s lactose-intolerant can’t eat dairy products, or somebody who’s allergic to coriander or cilantro — if you serve them cilantro, it’s really unpleasant for them. I feel extremely fortunate to know that I can pretty much put anything in my mouth and I’m fine. I don’t have disdain for anybody. I mean, it’s frustrating when somebody asks you to jump through hoops for them because they say that they can’t have butter, and then they order the richest, most decadent dessert. That’s frustrating.
Q: Describe your perfect, last-day-on-earth meal.
A: Oh, that’s so hard! Well, first of all, it would involve the people that are most important to me. It would be around a table in a really relaxed but celebratory way, with lots of energy and lots of love and passion. The food is almost — there are so many possibilities. You know, if it were with my children, it would be one thing; if it were with friends, it would be something else. But I think it would probably involve whatever was fresh at the moment. Like, we order our clams from a couple in Wellfleet, Pat and Barbara Woodbury. Their clams are unbelievable; they come from an hour and a half away from Boston. It’s probably the most perfect product. So it would probably involve those clams, and some fish from New England, and the vegetables that were the freshest, and prepared fairly simply, with great olive oil and lots of garlic and herbs and greens — I love greens. That would be the summer. If it were the winter, it would be something else; it would probably be a slow braise of something, or a roast goose — big, rich, deep flavors.
Q: Do you have a favorite guilty-pleasure food?
A: I love cheese. The book is now out, and we had a party yesterday, and I looked around, and I thought, you would think this is a cheese promotion, with everything I was serving. I love cheese — all kinds of cheese, from fresh cheese like fromage blanc all the way to something really stinky, a really stinky blue cheese or something like that. There are so many things you can do with them.
Q: I heard you have an interest in dance. What other non-food-related hobbies do you have?
A: Well, we actually had tango here at Rialto up until last April, and I was dancing pretty regularly. I haven’t danced in the last nine months or so, and actually my tango friends were here yesterday and I absolutely committed myself to dancing again; I think dance is just an amazing thing to be able to do all through your life. It’s a great way to get rid of energy and express yourself and connect with people. I don’t think Americans do enough contact dancing. I wish there were more restaurants that could do that. We couldn’t sustain it; after a year, it was a great thing to have done, and it was time for somebody else to take it over. So that’s one thing. Also, a year ago, my son wanted to learn how to snowboard, so we took snowboarding lessons together. It’s great! It’s fabulous — it’s so freeing. I have to say, though, when I decided to do this, I thought, we’ll be out on the slopes, I’ll feel so young. But I spent so much time on the ground. By the end, I felt just incredibly old.
Q: What’s next? Any plans for new restaurants, other cookbooks?
A: It depends on when you talk to me! If you had asked me six months ago, would we write another cookbook, both my husband and I would have said no. It was an incredibly educational process, and we learned a lot. It was not an easy process, either. At the end of the day, clearly, it’s been just amazingly rewarding to have produced this book together, and now we have a lot of fun with it. The reality, though, is that we have so much knowledge now, and we know how to work together, that it only makes sense to do something else. Something different — not just sort of a basket full of recipes, but something with a specific focus. So yes, we are definitely talking about that. In terms of other restaurants, we are a very active partnership, and so we’re always talking and thinking and imagining. But right now we’re focusing on what we’re doing: we’re focusing on Rialto and we’re focusing on Blu, and making sure that those are solid and where they need to be.
Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com
