by Lisa Snider

Created on: April 23, 2008   Last Updated: April 24, 2008

Rocco DiSpirito: The Science of Flavor
And What You Don't Know About Celebrity Chefs

"Find your inner chef!" encourages a voice from a stage at the Santa Barbara
Arts Festival. The stage, set between the Courthouse Sunken Gardens and Elements Restaurant, is surrounded by luxury cars and a ravenous crowd. The voice is celebrity chef, television personality and cookbook author Rocco DiSpirito, in town for the Lincoln Savor the Dream tour, and he's spending the afternoon hosting food demonstrations.

"The palate is the most important cooking tool," DiSpirito tells the audience while preparing his recipe for Shrimp Sate Saut (see below) and doling out samples. His books, Flavor and Rocco's 5 Minute Flavor, detail his philosophies surrounding the taste buds. Best known for his NBC reality television show, The Restaurant, DiSpirito is currently on a cross country tour with Lincoln and starring in a commercial for their new MKX crossover SUV.

Lincolns and chefs? What's the connection? "Their demographic appreciates food and entertaining and the good life and chefs are an access point to that," explains the 40-year-old DiSpirito.

Accustomed to the technical aspects of being a celebrity in front of cameras, getting out and working in front of an audience is a welcomed change. "What's great about it is that you're interacting with people and you're teaching them something which are the two most important things a chef can do," says DiSpirito. "It's much more personal than a TV show."

The native New Yorker has had an affinity for entertaining with food since childhood. "What I fell in love with the first day working in a pizzeria at 11 years old is the interaction with the people." The experience stuck and at the young age of 16, DiSpirito entered the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating, he pursued a business degree from Boston University. DiSpirito then went on to become a restaurateur, most notably as chef and owner of the former Union Pacific in New York City's Gramercy Park. In 1999 he was named Food & Wine's Best New Chef, which thrust him into the limelight with multiple television appearances, a radio show and three cookbooks.

Rocco's flavor philosophy
In recent years, DiSpirito's focus has been all about flavor. Thumbing through the pages of his beautiful first book, the James Beard award-winning Flavor, it's easy to grasp his concepts. "The world of ingredients breaks downs into four basic flavors the same way the
world of colors breaks down into three basic

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