Chris Cosentino is a passionate and thoughtful chef, author, cyclist, and philanthropist.
“A graduate of the culinary program at Johnson & Wales University in his home state of Rhode Island, Cosentino got his professional start at some of the country’s most beloved restaurants in Washington, D.C. and then the Bay Area. In his first executive chef position at Incanto, elevating a neighborhood Italian restaurant to the international scene. During his twelve-year tenure, Cosentino drew critical acclaim for his innovative Italian and whole animal cooking. Cosentino mastered the art of hand-crafted cured meats and helped raise awareness about sustainability & utilizing the entire animal. He also created Boccalone, a celebrated cured meat company, with manufacturing and retail operations in the Bay Area.”
“Cosentino won the popular series Top Chef Masters, competing against the nation’s top chefs to take the coveted title while earning over $140,000 for The Michael J. Fox Foundation. He has hosted, judged and competed on numerous national food television shows, including Top Chef; Top Chef Family Style; Iron Chef America; Next Iron Chef; Guy’s Grocery Games; The Best Thing I Ever Ate; Tournament of Champions; and Chefs vs. City.”
Currently, Chef Chris is gearing up to open Koast, a celebration of local ingredients and coastal cuisine, in Wailea Village on Maui, with a hoped-for launch for late 2024. Every other week Chef Chris releases a new episode of his “Losing Your Mind with Chris Cosentino” podcast.
Chef Chris Cosentino is our guest.
The SoCal restaurant show is live from the West Rift Manhattan Beach, an autograph collection hotel, home of Chute Coastal Bar and Kitchen, offering a creative dining experience. And welcome back. It is the 12th anniversary special of the SoCal restaurant show, and we're here at the West Drift Manhattan Beach, an autograph collection hotel, overlooking their golf course. I think the ducks and the swans are starting to come back. West Drift is the official hotel of Manhattan Beach Food and Wine, an inaugural food festival that continues tonight with the grand tasting in Manhattan Village. And I think there may still be a couple of tickets left and definitely worth your while. What we're trying to do is showcase the out-of-town chefs that are participating in this event and sitting across from for you right now is San Francisco's Chris Kazentine, who is going to be at the event this evening. Chris, it's a pleasure to welcome you to the show. I'm going to remind you of something, and we're going to go way, way back. But in our early years, your one or your two of the show, your friend Jatila was my co-host, and we did do an interview with you way back when. Now, I can't remember what we were talking about, but I do remember you, and welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I unfortunately, the brain's a little joggled at this point, so that's a bunch of years ago. Yeah, Chris, again, 11, you know, it's at least 10 or 11 years ago. I would not expect that you would remember it at all. Chris, a question we get a lot, because we do have young colinarians that listen to the show. And, you know, you're a graduate of Johnson & Wales, which is a pretty heady culinary school. The question that many young people ask now is, you know, what should I do? Should I do culinary school, or should I go in initially as an intern and learn in a kitchen? For someone that's had a lot of experience and can look back and reflect on this, what's your point of view? I think it's really important to understand where you want to be in the industry first, so I highly recommend working before you choose to go to school or not. I think building a really sound base in restaurants is extremely important to kind of understand how they work, where you may want to fit, because the hospitality industry is huge, right? People need to eat in every facet, so you may be taking care of food in, let's just use, for example, public schools, right? We need great chefs in public schools, we need great chefs in hospitals, we need great chefs to take care of folks as they get old, and we also need great restaurants, right? So, I think build your choices by starting, working, and then decide if you're going to be feeding kids in schools and folks that are older, you get some nutritional education, right? But it's really important to build your skill set. I think having a background in culinary school, it sets you up for success, it gives you foundation, it gives you technique, and then you can build upon that from there. Chris, what do you think of some of these young colonarians that are coming out of culinary school and thinking they're going to be a star on the Food Network? As someone who is a star on the Food Network and has done everything, both competing and judging, what's your advice to them on that little point? I think it's really important, you know, if that's your aspiration to be on television, that's great. But I think it's really important to build your skill set, right? You can't run a marathon and win the marathon if the day before you walked your dog around the block two times, it just doesn't happen. And I think that's everything in life. It's really important to put in the work, you know, build a foundation to them, keep layering and layering as you get older. We're constantly learning as chefs, even at my age now on the experience I've had, you know... Chris, you're hardly old, but go ahead. But in my career spanning, you know, I'm 52 years old and I'm still learning every day from everybody. Every chef is constantly learning throughout their career. And the moment that you think, "Yeah, I'm going to finish school and I'm going to be the executive chef or I'm going to be the next top dog." And I think that that's really an interesting thought process of the younger generation. I call it the "gimme, gimme, want, want," which a lot of people don't like to hear that, but everybody wants to succeed. And I firmly believe foundation, build on those legs. That's my number one thing. I like it. Chef Chris, a lot of chefs, at your level, established nationally prominent, we see a lot of them on Food Network. In terms of a sport that they enjoy, they love to play golf, but you're part of a subset that loves to cycle and cycle for charity, which is a wonderful thing. And there's really this growing universe of chefs that are your age, which is not old, that do this competitive cycling and just love it. Tell us a little bit more about that because I think that's kind of fun. So cycling, I mean, I was actually an ultra endurance professional cyclist many, many years ago, and when I found out I was going to be a parent, I quit. I figured, you know, I wasn't making money, I was racing bikes, having fun, I was doing 24-hour solo bike races all around the country. And, you know, as you get to a point, you want to have that zen moment, that kind of quiet place, and even though folks may think riding a bike is not that quiet place, it is. Because most of us in the restaurant are ADD, right? We are able to focus on many things at once. And what cycling does is force us to focus on all those things going on around us, consistent pedal strokes, missing a tree limb or not getting hit by a car, making the corner inside, not on the outside. So what that does is forces your brain to focus on all the million things you need to do to stay upright, and then the creativity starts going, because that ADD or ADHD is being kept busy, right? And then it kind of just plays more from there. You know, I've done Chef Cycle for nine years, which has been a great event, which is three days and 300 miles, but I also compete all around the country. This past year, I competed in an event called Unbound XL. Sounds serious. Unbound XL is a unsupported gravel race in Emporia, Kansas. It's 350 miles unsupported. So for me, it's a lot of fun. It keeps me super active, and it's low impact. That's why you're starting to see a lot more chefs get involved with it, because it's low impact on the body, because you're standing on your feet all day. Being on the bike just takes off that pressure. But it's also a great exercise. It's amazing. It's been really, really great. Now, in terms of future restaurant projects, you found your way to Maui, which is a nice place to find your way to. Tell us about that particular endeavor, because, Chris, as you know, in Southern California, in terms of a vacation destination, we love to go to the islands. So the restaurant coast will be in Wailea. It's actually in Wailea Village on the way down into the Wailea area. And it's actually three former employees asked me to be their partner. Wow. So, which is really great. David and Alicia are both from Rhode Island, which is where I'm from. And it's a really exciting new project for us. We are hoping, in the next, let's just say two months, we'll be hoping, hopefully before the holidays. Yeah, otherwise you might as well wait until January. Exactly. But it's really great, because I feel really lucky to be able to communicate with the chefs on the island, like Sheldon. Leanne have been really forthcoming with great farmers and fishermen. The island has so much to offer, Maui itself, right? And then you start adding on all the other islands, and there's so much beautiful product there. It's a wonderland of knowledge to learn, and I'm really excited to be a participant there. Well, Chris, I like the idea that you're leading the charge, because what's so unfortunate is, is over the years since, you know, Hawaii became part of the United States, they could be totally self-sustainable. And they were, you know, pre-statehood. And I've heard a shocking statistic that's 70% of their food product. They import from the mainland. And it's sort of what's wrong with this picture, because you're talking about the agriculture bounty that's there. You can grow anything in Hawaii except wine grapes, because they need to be dormant for a period of time. But that doesn't stop them from trying. But it's crazy. And so what's really wonderful is, is you as part of the chef community and your colleagues, you are bringing this back and going to the small family farmers that are in Hawaii. Because believe me, in Hawaii, they are only small family farms, and saying, "Hey, if you grow X, Y, and Z for me, I will buy everything." So this is inspirational. It can't happen fast enough, but it is happening. It's really incredible. I mean, there's so many farmers market. There's actually a farmers market right in front of our restaurant. And what's really great about it is there is a collective where I actually have just got an email this morning telling me what's available from multiple different farms, and there's one person who will deliver it to the restaurants. And the list is forever changing and growing. I mean, there are people who are while harvesting pohole. You have green papayas. There's like 12 different varieties of mangoes, green coconuts. I mean, it's just, and this is just off the tip of my tongue. It's never ending. Wild cacao pods. Pohole is a fiddlehead fern. Looks like a fiddlehead fern. I like to treat them like asparagus, but I mean, it's something you can go harvest wild. You take the road to Hana. There are farms everywhere. There's so much there. There's so much beauty. There's so much deliciousness and the bounty of the ocean. It's, it's unlike any other place. Well, we're big supporters of the Big Island Chocolate Festival, which is done on the Big Island generally in the spring and when a lot of people in the United States don't realize the only place that cacao can grow in the United States is Hawaii. So if you had a choice of buying Hawaii chocolate versus God knows where, isn't that something to support? So there's a, you know, a whole endeavor that's going on to build the cacao business there. And again, some of the farmers on the, the Big Island give them the opportunity to have a cash crop. So it's something wonderful that we definitely want to, you know, follow, but we look forward to following your progress in, in that area because it's just so important. But, you know, here again, it's the chef community leading the charge. Now, Chris, before we run out of time, you have your own podcast that drops every other week. I understand there is a name change that is going to be happening. So it is currently losing your mind with Chris Kazentino. What are we gravitating towards? So the podcast itself is the conversation with multiple different chefs, athletes, musicians, photographers, about how they got to where they are today. The difficult journey for them from the start to where they are now, the successes, the failures. And I think it's really important to understand that failure does lead to success, right? Some of the best recipes were created by mistakes. So having these conversations with so many, I mean, we've had Jet Tila has been on, Neal Frazier has been on, Guy Fieri was on, Sherry Yard, David LaFever. I mean, the list continues, Lachlan Morton, professional cyclist, who just rode the entire circumference of Australia, you know, brilliant folks who have really truly mastered their career and how they've done it. We are going to have a change coming up. The name will be changing, but it'll still be the same podcast. And what's great is it's offered on just so many different outlets. But can't quite give away the name yet. We're going to hold that one in the bag a little bit longer. Chris, with the schedule that you have and your podcasts are about an hour and a half, how do you have time to do that in addition to everything else? Time management has become very difficult. I have an incredible wife who kind of keeps me on track, and she's been able to really help me navigate that whole process. I'm not always great at it. Sometimes I'm up super late editing things, but trying to do the best I can. Ladies and gentlemen, San Francisco is on the move, Chef Chris Kazentine. We will see him tonight at the Manhattan Beach Food and Wine Festival, and we look forward to following this progress. Thanks, Chef. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. You are listening to The SoCal Restaurant Show. It is our 12th anniversary special. Next up, Chef Neil Frazier, who is the host chef for Manhattan Beach Food and Wine. We're proudly presented by Melissa's World Variety Produce. We'll be back in a flash. [MUSIC PLAYING]
