Eating with Chef Jasper Mirabile

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me mentioning a meal I recently had at Jasper’s in Kansas City, MO.  Some of you may have even gotten the chance to see the picture I took of some of the amazing food Chef Jasper made for us.  Others probably saw the repeated comments that at any moment, I was sure I was going to burst.  Despite the worries about my own mortality, that meal was sooooo worth it.

Jasper – The Tradition

To set the stage for this meal, I should let you know that the Mirabile family has been serving up outstanding Italian food to hungry Kansas Citians for over fifty years.  It all began in 1954 when Leonard Mirabile opened Jasper’s with his son Jasper.  According to their website, back then you could get a three course meal for seventy-nine cents.  (I can only imagine how fat I’d be if I could still get Chef Jasper to cook for me for seventy-nine cents…  Yikes.)

Since 1954, Jasper’s has seen a lot of change.  For instance, they moved from their original location on Wornall to Watt’s Mill on 103rd and State Line.  They have also gone from a neighborhood restaurant to one of the most decorated restaurants in the country, earning a Mobil Four Stars for dining excellence, the AAA Four Diamonds and DIRONA award (among others).  The restaurant has also seen a third generation of Mirabile, Jasper’s sons Leonard and Jasper, Jr., enter the restaurant business.

Chef Jasper – The Culinary Icon

However, Jasper’s is more than a restaurant.  If there is a food event in Kansas City, Chef Jasper is probably there.  He teaches numerous classes all over the Kansas City area, on such varied topics as making mozzarella to teaching kids the joy of cooking.  He has cookbooks.  He has a radio show on AM 710.  His smiling face can be found in any Hen House market.  He works with cheese producers to evangelize good, artisan cheeses.  He helps local food producers.  He knows everyone.

In other words, there may be no single name more synonymous with food in Kansas City (which is saying a lot, since Kansas City is starting to establish itself on the culinary map.)

Jasper’s – The Menu

And there I was with Mrs. WellDone at Chef Jasper’s invitation eating the best (and by several pounds of food the largest) meal I have ever eaten.

For reference, here’s the menu:

1. Lobster cappuccino with pancetta and foam
2. Shrimp Scampi alla Livornese Over Polenta
3. An “Appetizer” of Eggplant Othello and Lobster Ravioli
4. Half a loaf of good Italian bread
5. Caprese Salad with Mozzarella Made Tableside, Heirloom Tomatos Chef’s Wife Grew, Basil, and a Homemade Balsamic Reduction
6. A Pasta “Tasting” Consisting Of
   • Pasta Nanni with Prosciutto, peas, romano, mushrooms, and tomato sauce
   • Gagootsa sauce (Italian gourd) sauce over ditali pasta
   • Rigatoni with a Melon cream sauce
7. For our entrees:
   • Five hour slow roasted pork shank
   • Chicken Saltimbucco
8. For dessert:
   • Peach Napolean with Chef’s mama’s pastry cream
   • Death by Chocolate
9. After Dinner Drink:
   • Homemade Amaretto
   • Homemade Limoncello
   • Homemade Anisette
10. House Wine

With a menu like that, I don’t even know where to start describing everything.  It was all amazing.  However, in the interest of space, I will limit this article to the two times in the meal when the food was so good I lost the ability to speak English.  (Later, I’ll talk about more of the food and maybe sniff out a recipe or two.)
 

Pasta Nanni – The First Moment of Silence

The first time I lost the ability to speak was when I took the first bite of the pasta nanni.  It came served on a long plate with three individual sections, one for each of the pastas on the tasting menu.  I didn’t know what it was, and frankly, I was far more excited about the gagootsa sauce.  However, I think the nanni was closest to me, so I started with it.

Mere words defy the flavor of the pasta.  I can tell you there was salty Prosciutto, earthy tomato, sweet peas, savory mushrooms, and rich cream.  But those are just words.  They cannot convey how perfectly those ingredients worked together.  The saltiness of the Prosciutto was perhaps the lead flavor, but the tomato sauce and the peas wouldn’t let that flavor dominate.  Then there was the touch of cream, giving the dish just enough richness to take it from great pasta to something magical.

As a side note, I have two regrets from the evening at Jasper’s.  The first was that I shared any of that pasta with my wife and the second was that I saved some it for later.  See, our entrees arrived with the pasta course, so there was other pasta, pork osso buco and my wife’s chicken to eat.  All the while, the pasta nanni got cold and while it was good when I got back to it, it was nothing compared to when they first brought it out.  Plus, I think my wife ate all the Prosciutto.  Which is a crime in some places I think.

To this day, I still want more.  I will not consider my life complete unless I can go back to Jasper’s and eat that pasta again. 

Chef Jasper’s Chicken – Pure Bliss

The second moment of bliss so intense words failed me was when I ate my wife’s chicken dish.  When she ordered chicken Saltimbocco, I laughed. 

When I saw it on the menu, I didn’t think it was anything special.  It’s a Roman dish of chicken breast, ham, a little cheese, and some tomato sauce.  Traditionally, it’s rolled, but Chef Jasper says that it dries out the chicken too much so he left it unrolled.  There’s also a sauce made from lemon, stock, white wine, butter, and sage.  But still, when I saw it on the menu, I wasn’t excited.  I came for the big, the fancy, and the impressive dishes with hard names to say (ie osso bucco.) 

Don’t get me wrong, the pork was fantastic, but the chicken Saltimbocco was unreal.  It just worked.  The chicken was moist and the ham was perfect for adding a bit of salt, a bit of pork fat, and a bit of flavor.  The tomato sauce was gently nestled on to the chicken and added a nice bit of earthy tomato taste.  Then there was just enough cheese to top the dish to add a bit of extra saltiness and keep the dish together. 

Then there was the sauce.  That slightly citrusy, slightly tangy, slightly sagey butter-lemon-sage sauce.  To be honest, I shouldn’t like the sauce.  Citrus and wine together are about my least favorite sauce pairings, but there was I soaking it up with a piece of bread.

More than the ingredients, that dish worked because of the artistry.  You can probably find a frozen dinner with the same ingredients as that chicken Saltimbocco, but you probably can’t find a hundred chefs in the world who could make them absolutely sing like Chef Jasper.  I just can’t get over how there should be nothing special about an unrolled rolled chicken dish, but in a master’s hands, it was simply sublime.

Like the pasta, I would say that I wouldn’t consider my life complete unless I went back and had that dish it again, but I took care of it already.  So that part of my life is complete.  Though I am kinda jonsing for it again.

Chef Jasper Mentioned Melon Pasta Special

Also, I should mention the Rigatoni melon, which was the completely odd, but absolutely fantastic pasta dish with a sauce of melon, parmesan cream, and a little bacon.  If that sounds familiar, you might have seen Rachel Ray make it in her magazine, though Chef Jasper assures me his was the better version because of the bacon.  I refuse to argue against either Chef Jasper or bacon.

What amazed me was that dish its utter potential for chaos.  When you mix sour/salty parmesan cream with sweet melon and salty/fatty bacon, you should have a mess on your hands.  However, in the hands of a master, that combination was something both my wife and I loved.

And so that just part my meal with Chef Jasper.  I plan to talk about so many other parts of that dish and everything I learned from talking with him.  But for now, I need to go.  I hear some pasta nanni calling my name.

The logo was taken from Jasper’s website.

Jennifer Iannolo

I knew there was something special about Jennifer Iannolo (aka @foodphilosophy) when she once tweeted her favorite meal.  The details have long since been forgotten except for the fact it started with “when me and Charlie” sat down for a meal. 

Now, for the rest of you who aren’t on a first name basis with the culinary greats, the “Charlie” she spoke of, was none other than Charlie Trotter, one of the best chefs in the world.  And the restaurant they ate at belonged to Alain Ducasse.  

I knew she was a great podcaster and food vlogger and I had visited her site at the Culinary Media Network (CMN) many times.  I just had no idea she was so close with Charlie (that’s Chef Trotter to the rest of us) and that she had so many great stories to tell. 

From listening to her podcasts and watching her vlogs, I always had this romantic notion that her days are filled with hob knobbing with chefs, eating their delicious foods, and then coming home at night to Tweet about it.  This, of course, would be her regular schedule.  On special days she’s jet setting halfway across the world to hob knob with chefs, eat their delicious foods, and then go back to the hotel to Tweet about it. 

When I finally chased her down, she slightly disabused me of the notion.  Apparently, there is more to being the CEO of the CMN than the whole hob knobbing/eating/jet setting thing, though that is a very visible part of what she does because she podcasts and vlogs about it.  (If you’re interested, you can see some of her work on the CMN site and on her own FoodPhilosophy.com.)  Still, despite all of that work, she’s a businesswoman first.

Using the business degree she earned from the Stern School of Business at New York University, she offers food consulting to various restaurants.  While she already has a presence in Web 2.0 consulting and media, there’s something else in the works that she hinted at, but now all I can say is that it is coming soon.  This project will allow her to consult with restaurants on the full range of Social Media marketing opportunities.  More to come…

In the meantime, she’ll have to content herself with all her other jobs.  Like the food consulting and being a cookbook author.  Together with her Culinary Media Network associates (including Chef Mark Tafoya who was interviewed earlier on the blog), she assembled The Gilded Fork Cookbook, a cookbook containing 3-4 years’ worth of recipes from the website.  Even though the recipes are on the web, “there’s something about a physical cookbook,” she says. 

The goal of the book was simple.  “We wanted to convey our idea of entertaining.”  Jennifer, Mark and the others all believe the entertaining should be fun and stress-free, which is why they’ve taken care of all the details, even the wine pairings in their book.  (A full review is coming, I promise.)

She also runs an online boutique, the Gilded Fork (shop.gildedfork.com), where she offers artisan products that are hard to find anywhere else.  The site features brownies, oils, flor de sel, truffle salt, black garlic, and a special Italian olive oil that “people buy by the case,” she says.  It’s a store “for foodies” by people who know food.

So podcaster, vlogger, social media master, online store owner, cookbook author, and a woman who rubs elbows with the finest chefs in the world, all describe Jennifer, but they still don’t form the complete picture because they don’t explain her philosophy.  For a woman known to many as @foodphilosophy, it’s important to know what drives her, because beliefs about food drive everything she does.

At heart, Jennifer is a sensualist who believes that food is something that can excite every sense: smell, sight, touch, sound, and, of course, taste.  It was something she experienced while working in the kitchens and in the businesses of some of the greatest chefs in the world : Thomas Keller, Charlie, Daniel Boulud, just to name a few. 

While working with these great chefs, she also learned quickly that being a chef is not a glamorous business, so she wanted to find out “what moved their [the chefs] souls.”  She wanted to find what it was about cooking that got them through the tough times and share that with her readers, listeners, and watchers.  She wanted to give them a chef’s point of view.

All of this culminated in, what she calls, a “moment of truth.”  She sat down and wrote an article called “On Food and Sensuality,” (read about it here) which was a phrase she used to describe food that was as pleasing to the mind and body as sex.  It was something chefs grasped intuitively, but as she wrote the article, she was not sure how the idea would be received. 

Fast forward five years and her article continues  to captivate readers and is opening up avenues which may or may not be suitable for a G-rated blog like this one, she explains while laughing.  It’s also allowed her to open “Bachelor Bootcamp” so that she can teach us guys a few things about the sensual pleasures of food and how to use it to accentuate the sensual pleasures of …other things.

Ultimately, though, I save the best for last.  After all the time in the kitchen, directing a “space camp for foodies” called L’Ecole des Chefs from Relais & Chateaux, managing the James Beard Award, and writing an article that is changing the way people think about food, there is one thing that amazes me about Jennifer: she has no formal culinary training.

When compared to being on a first name basis with Michelin-rated chefs or getting a cookbook out in three months (which is seriously how long it took to get The Gilded Fork out), it may not seem like much to anyone else, but she and Chef Mark are inspirations to any of us who want to play with a food for a living.  It may take some hardwork, but it can be done and for that bit of inspiration, we owe Jennifer a big thanks.

So when you’re done here, check out her site.  You can get a feeling for her recipes by checking out the cocktail below.  Oh, if you do go to the FoodPhilosophy.com website, that is actually her with the grapes.  Most importantly read her words, watch her have fun and know that this is a women who has inspired chefs to keep cooking, people to learn to be chefs, and more than one blogger to think about living and playing with his food.

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It took about ten seconds of tweeting with Chef Mark Tafoya (that’s @ChefMark on Twitter), a personal chef in New York City, for me to realize he knew great food.  Probably because I’m slow, it took me a couple of days to realize he was the same chef I had been listening to on his Remarkable Palate Podcast on the Culinary Media Network.

That’s why I was all a twitter (sorry…) when I got the chance to call him while he was on the job.  We talked about what it means to be a personal chef and how to make great food.

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The Meals Chef Mark Prepared

“So, what is a personal chef?”

I wanted to start the interview with an easy question.  Apparently, it wasn’t that easy.  According to Chef Mark, there is confusion over the terms “personal chef” and “private chef.”  Private chefs are employees of a patron and work only for that one employer.  Like a butler or a driver, they are part of the household staff and they are expensive.

Mark is personal chef.  He is neither a full time employee, nor expensive.  Instead of living with his clients, he goes to their homes and prepares meals for them in their own kitchens.  After cooking the meals for his clients, he places them in storage containers and puts them either in the refrigerator or the freezer.  It’s kind of like having frozen dinners if your frozen dinners were made by a gourmet chef and cooked to your exact standards.

“What’s the most important thing for a personal chef?”

Chef Mark wastes no time answering that good communication is key to his business.  “I’m not here to stoke my ego,” he said.  Instead, Chef Mark wants to make food that his clients want to eat and the only way he can do that is if his clients tell him what this is.

He recalls one client who kept apologizing that he didn’t like one type of food or only liked another in certain situations.  Mark laughs, saying he had to finally tell his client to stop apologizing.  “It’s going to hurt my feelings a lot more when you fire me than if you tell me you didn’t like my dish,” Mark informed the client.  This apparently relaxed the client and Chef were able to go on and provide his client with the exact dishes he wanted to eat prepared exactly the way he wanted to eat them.  Such is the way to success in the personal chef business.

Over time, Chef Mark learns what his clients love.  For instance, the client whose house Mark was at was an admitted carnivore.  When I talked with him, he was making all sorts of amazing dishes like pork loin stuffed with chorizo and jalapenos, broccoli with a Dijon vinaigrette, a fresh apple salsa for another meat dish, and a salad (even carnivores need some greens.)   Of course, if the client had been a vegetarian or had special dietary needs, Chef Mark could have easily prepared dishes for them.  Believe me, I’ve seen his vegan recipes (available in Gilded Fork Cookbook.)

“How did you get started as a personal chef?” 

By asking this, I found that Chef Mark got started in the normal fashion: he went to Yale to study French and theatre.  Like you do.  After realizing he might not make it as an actor, he got hired as the food director/event coordinator at his friend’s party house.  There, he realized how much he loved cooking and eventually became a personal chef.

“Do you do private events?”

I figured he did, but I wanted to ask Chef Mark anyway.  I was right, they account for almost fifty percent of his business and are, in fact, one of his favorite parts of being a personal chef.  In fact, after he got done with his client’s weekly meals and our call, he was headed to a home in New Jersey so he could cook a three year anniversary dinner.  And, oh yeah, he cooked the couple’s proposal dinner five years ago.  (I have no doubt, the food sealed the deal.)

Anything else?

During his career as a personal chef, Chef has done so much more than I can fit here.  He was voted Marketer of Year twice.  He appeared on Fox News as an expert on personal chefs.  He is a member and an instructor in the United States Personal Chef Association (USPCA) and as I write this, he is in New Orleans teaching personal chefs to appear on television.

As I mentioned before, he’s a great podcaster and he’s also a cookbook author, having recently worked on The Gilded Fork Cookbook with Jennifer Iannolo from the Culinary Media Network.  Oh, and he’s an expert in storing and cooking food so that it freezes in such a way that it reheats perfectly.  (Which may be of interest only to me.)

The only thing that keeps Chef Mark out of my kitchen is the fact I live in Kansas, but it doesn’t stop me from asking him questions, listening to his shows, or buying his cookbook.  If that sounds like the type of chef you want cooking for you, head out to his website marktafoya.com or call him at 917.405.0088.

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The picture was taken by Chef Mark on his iPhone after we stopped chatting.  That is the actual set of meals he did for his client.  Looks good, huh?