Questlove’s New Jam: Throwing Cool Dinner Parties With Celebrity Chefs and Writing a Book on Food

By
Human Rights Fighter
-
0
558

[ad_1]

Now he’s dishing on his love of eating well with his new book, Something to Food About: Exploring Creativity With Innovative Chefs, due out April 12. Only a book on Prince would round things out.

The 45-year-old Tonight Show bandleader has been hosting food-salon get-togethers in his Frank Gehry-designed New York City apartment building for years now. Since the closing of Hybird—a fried-chicken stand that Thompson opened at the city’s Chelsea Market with restaurateur Stephen Starr—these eclectic dinner parties in lower Manhattan, full of celeb chefs, have been Questlove’s main culinary outlet for his foodie fixations. And now, Something to Food About.

The book, co-written by the New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, features Questlove in conversation with 10 world-renowned chefs, including Nathan Myhrvold, Dominique Crenn, Daniel Humm and Ludo Lefebvre. The author-DJ-drummer-“connector” (in the Malcolm Gladwell sense) recently took time out for a similar conversation with The Root to discuss the evolution of his palate from Devil Dogs to kouign-amanns. And, of course, Prince.

The Root: What was your path from Philly to foodie?

Questlove: It really started once I saw how advanced food-truck culture was becoming. One night in Portland, [Ore.,] after a DJ gig, this Mister Softee truck rolls up with only grilled-cheese sandwiches. I saw that and I was like, “Yo, this is going to be a revolution.” I was joking with my manager, like, “Yo, I want to do a soul food restaurant, but in a Mister Softee truck and call it, like, Soul on a Roll or something.” And then we started brainstorming.

My DJ manager is Korean, and she was like, “Well, there’s a Korean-fried-chicken revolution about to explode in the United States. People are starting to discover that Korean fried chicken is almost as good as Southern American fried chicken. We should go half on a Korean-fried-chicken truck, ’cause they’re starting to explode all over Southern California.”

TR: So Hybird, your Chelsea Market fried-chicken stand, started as a food-truck idea?

Q: I was planning on investing in a food-truck business. Then my manager, Rich [Nichols], was like, “That’s only realizing half the potential. You have a football in your hand and you want to kick a field goal and not do a touchdown. If you’re really going to touch in the food area, take over the s–t. Realize that chefs are the new rock stars and use your knowledge of food and really make something of it.” 

I never even heard the term “foodie” until I got to [Late Night With Jimmy Fallon]. I wasn’t a Food Channel worshipper, but I was aware of these different types of restaurants. The Roots have been really privileged to eat in some of the … finer places on earth. But I just consider that as an everyday thing, not something that I can market and make something out of myself. So the more we started brainstorming, I traded in the Korean-fried-chicken-truck business for the drumstick. We spent about three years doing heavy focus groups, meticulous planning.

From 2010 to 2013, it was nothing but events and slowly gaining the trust. I mean, when you can buy your way into situations, you may not get that much in respect. It’s like buying your way into a fraternity. So you really have to gain the trust of the [Anthony] Bourdains of the world, the [David] Changs of the world, the [April] Bloomfields of the world. And once they sort of gave the green light that they accepted me into their fraternity, I just decided to really make the most of making bucket-list dreams come true.

[ad_2]