"JonathanWaxman" news and stories

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• Spring means chocolate bunnies, matzo-ball soup, and...gogola. Time to celebrate Phagwah!
• Jonathan Waxman may not have an Italian name, but his new cookbook tells a different story.
• Midtown's La Petite Maison: bad French, good posture, and terrific food.

Photo: Amazon.com

'A Great American Cook:
Recipes from the Home Kitchen of One of Our Most Influential Cooks'
Jonathan Waxman with Tom Steele
Photographs by John Kernick
Houghton Mifflin -- 2007
Buy it on Amazon

It's rather hilarious when a chef's cookbook matches his real-life persona.

We interviewed Jonathan Waxman -- of recent "Top Chef Masters" fame -- a year or two ago about how to properly cut open an artichoke. He was confident that we'd be able to briskly pick up the trick (which could cause an untrained cook to handily slice off a digit) without much practice.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that the man who trained Bobby Flay in the kitchen some 20 years ago is a pretty darn good teacher, and we were happily producing pretty decent artichoke specimens within minutes.

That same confident, coaxing voice is present throughout Waxman's cookbook, a hodgepodge of his culinary experiences. From the red-pepper pancakes with corn and caviar he introduced at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse to a potato gratin he picked up while training in France, this is a fine compilation from a man who has trained many of the American greats -- and who used to hobnob with the likes of James Beard and Julia Child.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying, after the jump.

Jonathan Waxman Photo: Fabrizio Ferri, courtesy of jonathanwaxman.com

Could you feel the love last night on Top Chef Masters? Sure, the season until now has been all about pro-chef bonding: sharing techniques; lending a hand in the crunch; reminiscing about experiences in the culinary world.

But Wednesday was something else entirely. The competing foursome went to a place somewhere beyond mere camaraderie -- a place even further than the conciliatory, bromantic half-hug shared by final-round losers Roy Yamaguchi (Roy's Hawaiian Kitchen) and Michael Cimarusti (of LA's acclaimed Providence). What we witnessed last night was an emotional journey, a blubbering, four-hanky love-in.

The warm fuzzies started with the introduction of this group's demigod, Jonathan Waxman. Not only was the Barbuto owner and New Yorker a literal mentor to Cimarusti years prior, but his clout with James Beard and Julia Child back in the day held Yamaguchi and Oprah's favorite Southern chef Art Smith (Table 52) in awe for most of the episode.

When it came time for each chef to pick the ingredients for each others' final cook-off, their selections the best seasonal goods Whole Foods had to offer, rather than sundry oddities meant to undermine the competition: kumquats, sunchokes, mangoes, beautiful bone-in pork chops. "The word 'sabotage' isn't in a professional chef's vocabulary," Waxman reminded us.