34 JANUARY 2020
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He stuck with
the commitment,
no matter how
painful. That’s
what chefs do.
And that’s who he
is to his core. He
had to get back in
the kitchen.
if it’s not in a restaurant, it doesn’t count.”
DiSpirito wrote cookbooks, headlined food
festivals, developed food products, did consult-
ing work, hosted a now-notorious book sign-
ing at an event for a cat food brand (“I didn’t
put all my heart and soul into it because it
wasn’t required. I just took the money, right? I’ve done two of
those things and 8,000 of the other things,” DiSpirito said with
a sigh.), went on Dancing with the StarsÑhis mother’s favorite
program—and did plenty of other TV. He kept up his Ironman
training until he couldn’t.
“I thought, ‘This is the absolute best thing I could be doing with
my life. She deserves to have a dignified and comfortable end of
life. We were so close and she’s done so much for me, that this
is absolutely the right thing to do.’ I didn’t really think about
what the costs were, what the trade-offs were.” Her final days in
2013 were “inhumane,” Dispirito said. “You have to go through
this rigmarole, this sort of fake process of taking painkillers and
then upping it to morphine. We’re more humane with pets than
we are with human beings.”
He made sure that his mother’s final hours played out as she’d
requested, with family all around and Perry Como crooning
in the background—a dignified end to nearly a decade of pain
for Nicolina, and the start of some very public familial legal
struggles for DiSpirito. Read about them if you care to; they’re
not hard to find.
What you won’t see in those newspaper and magazine
archives are images of Rocco DiSpirito in a wheelchair, immo-
bile in his home, or in physical therapy while he learned to walk
again. In the course of his mother’s illness, as often happens
to caretakers, DiSpirito neglected his own needs. He’d suffered
from back issues his whole life and couldn’t find time for his
own doctor’s appointments. Two years after Nicolina’s death,
his bill came due.
“I was especially fond of the chiropractor I was referred to
because when I first met him, he said, ‘I’m going to make sure
you never need surgery.’ And unfortunately I did need surgery
because I didn’t listen to him.” The emergency diskectomy—a
kind of spinal surgery—for his acute sciatica was something
DiSpirito had dreaded for his entire adult life, and it left him
as an invalid for a time.
Weeks of being unable to move at all were compounded by
his inability to ask for help. He was barely able to get in and out
of a wheelchair, but that’s not how he wanted the public or his
peers to regard him. So like he had so many times before, he
put on a grand show for the public while his mind and body
cried out for respite.
In typical Rocco DiSpirito fashion, he agreed to participate
in an event in Florida while still unable to walk. A fellow chef
pushed him around in a wheelchair, and fans,
not knowing the severity of the situation,
found the whole thing hilarious. He looked
back on it while we talked, shaking his head:
“A normal person would just say, ‘I have to can-
cel.’ That didn’t even occur to me.” He stuck
with the commitment, no matter how painful. To his mind,
that’s what chefs do. And that’s who and what he is to his core.
He had to get back in the kitchen.
DiSpirito promised himself that this time, it was going to be
on his terms, serving the kind of food that had pulled him back
from the brink. “All the things I write about in my books, I have
been hungry to show people—that you can eat an indulgent meal
and still eat a healthy meal,” DiSpirito said. “I started doing that
in 2006, and of course back then, no one thought it made sense.”
Over a decade later, Stephen Brandman did. The Journal
Hotels co-owner and CEO sought out DiSpirito, offering an
opportunity to revamp The Standard, High Line’s celeb-magnet
restaurant with a plant-based menu. He quietly stepped back to
the stove at The Standard Grill in May 2018 and, before departing
last fall, spent most of his waking hours there.
Those long days are a different proposition in your 50s than
in your 20s, and DiSpirito knew that down to his often-aching
bones. When he bent down to get truffles out of the lowboy, get-
ting up was hard, and he was still dealing with the last vestiges
of drop foot. Many nights he just wanted to get home to his dogs,
Captain and Lenny. But he was still strong, he said, and full of
the passion that had always driven him.
It comes through in the food, I told him. The scallop and uni
in mustard oil and tomato water sent me rocketing back to that
lunch at Union Pacific a decade and a half before, and then a
cleverly sharp beet tartare snapped me back to the present. I
genuinely teared up at an ingenious dairy-free creamed Swiss
chard—a dish I’d assumed would be off the menu for me forever,
due to my dietary restrictions.
I ate with abandon because I knew DiSpirito had done every-
thing he could to make sure it was as safe as it was sensually
glorious, and I settled in against my husband’s shoulder in the
cab on the way home, thoroughly contented. He’d never gotten
to eat at Union Pacific, and I was giddy that I’d gotten to share
Rocco’s food with him. “Wasn’t that just the best?” I asked him,
and he wholeheartedly agreed.
DiSpirito parted ways with The Standard Grill a few months
after that transcendent meal. But he isn’t walking away from
the industry. The past year behind a restaurant stove reignited
something inside him, and he knows more than ever that he
cannot live without it. He may need a moment to figure out
where he’s going next—but there is definitely a next. I know it
will be worth the wait.
