Happy Chef Blogging Friday
Meet Scott Carsberg of Lampreia restaurant in Seattle. He was the 2006 James Beard Foundation Award winner for Best Chef Northwest/Hawai'i.Chef Carsberg has had a long history in the restaurant/food business, more than a quarter of a century in fact, involving a myriad of experiences.
He started working as a busboy at 14. He had a stint on an Alaskan fishing boat. While still in high school, he was an intern at the restaurant in the Four Seasons hotel in Seattle
After the Four Seasons he talked his way into a job at Le Pavillon in Washington, D.C. He then went to work in Italy at Villa Mozart.
After six years of working and eating in Italy and Germany, Mr. Carsberg moved back to Seattle where he met his future wife, Hyun Joo Paek. Together they opened Lampreia, maxing out their credit cards, working for no money, establishing a restaurant the old-fashioned way.
Whew.He's also had a long history of running hot or cold with the diners at Lampreia.
According to the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
"It's heaven or hell. Chef Scott Carsberg is a genius or he's nuts. In dozens of online reviews, Lampreia's ultra-expensive dinners are described as dreamy or an absolute nightmare.
...Why would anyone put up with this nonsense?Well, the food is extraordinary. Pristine ingredients cooked beautifully and painstakingly plated as if they were edible sculpture.
It was the black truffle gnocchi that convinced me of the kitchen's capacity to dazzle. These pillowy soft pasta look a little like a Hershey's Kiss, a flurry of snow-white shredded sheep's-milk ricotta nestled against the intensely flavored, whimsically shaped gnocchi. For days I couldn't stop thinking about this dish."
He also helped develop a gorgeous "on-line" cookbook, coming from Washington you knew it had to be "All About Apples."
In an era of virtual reality, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a virtual cookbook. What wasn't to be expected was that the first virtual cookbook would be not only useful and informative but drop-dead gorgeous. The joint creation of Lampreia chef Scott Carsberg and Hillel Cooperman's food blog, tastingmenu.com, All About Apples is a step-by-step 100-page manual that, if every meticulous instruction and illustration is followed to the letter, will allow an average cook in an average kitchen to re-create an eight-course tasting menu, every course employing apples in a different fashion. Crab rolled in paper-thin Red Delicious tissue; Buckeye apple stuffed with foie gras; red-cabbage soup with apple gelée; red prawns with cooked and raw Zumi applesDownload the FREE PDF of "All About Apples" HERE courtesy of tastingmenu.com
Labels: celebrity chefs, Chef Blogging Friday, Cookbooks, Washington
