Zak pelaccio biography channel

F&W Star Chef
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Restaurants: Fatty Crab (New York); Fish & Game (Hudson, NY)
Education: French Culinary Institute
Got his start: As a stagiere at Daniel in 1996.
Who taught you to cook?

What is the most important thing you learned from them? An old French guy named Claude, an expat who worked in the French kitchen at the Westin Hotel in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I never got to know him well enough to learn his last name.

Zak pelaccio biography channel

I worked in the Thai kitchen but couldn’t speak Thai, so every now and then I’d talk to him.
I can’t say he taught me how to cook, but he taught me to cook neat, very slowly and listen to my food when I cook.
He also taught me not to accept the tools that are available, not to accept the environment you’re given, but to manipulate it to make it work for you.

For example, he taught me how to make duck confit. He used to keep the oven door slightly ajar because the ovens wouldn’t go low enough for him. This was before sous