32 JANUARY 2020
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Where’d You Go, Rocco? He was a star at Union
Pacific then fell out of sight for 15 years. Then he
was back—and gone again. By Kat Kinsman
THE TASTEMAKER
ROCCO DISPIRITO BROKE UP MY RELATIONSHIP. To be fair, it was
on the rocks already, but that lunch at Union Pacific in 2004
opened the cracks even wider. I spent the ride home rhapsodiz-
ing about chicken salad with daikon and Champagne vinaigrette
and sautéed skate with lime pickle, Swiss chard, and brown
butter to the increasing annoyance of the man I was dating.
He had seemed content at the table, but apparently he’d had
all he could swallow from me. “Why does everything have to
be ‘the best’? Can’t you just settle for a meal or anything else
that’s just fine?”
Apparently, none of us could. My boyfriend and I ended things
a few weeks later, as the then-37-year-old DiSpirito was very
publicly getting the boot from his namesake restaurant on 22nd
Street (made infamous on the show The Restaurant in the early
days of reality TV) and abdicating his post as executive chef of
Union Pacific. That was where he’d once earned three stars from
Ruth Reichl and been named a 1999 Food & Wine Best New
Chef. According to The New York Times, DiSpirito released a
statement saying, “I have made a decision to take a break from
the day-to-day operations of a restaurant to focus on other
opportunities outside the restaurant world.”
Those “opportunities” swiftly eroded his standing. Neither
his peers or his former customers could reconcile the image of
their wunderkind as a pitchman for pasta and pet food, hawking
pots on QVC, or hustling in sequins on Dancing with the Stars.
Unearth any tabloid from the early ’00s, and the ire is evident.
Even though gossip items tipped heavily toward breathless
coverage of his dating life (one reporter grilled him on if he’d
ever had sex in his restaurants’ kitchens), he had the benedic-
tion of his peers so long as he was still cemented in a restaurant
kitchen. When he left, they unleashed their fury, painting him
as a fame chaser, a megalomaniac, a wasted talent. Anthony PHO
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