I like to relate food to sex, honestly, because I think it’s pretty similar,” says Gabe Kennedy. “I don’t ever want to be overtly sexual about it, but there’s not much we put in our body. Like we put in food and water, and some people put in a penis. It’s pretty intimate. Like a partner, you want to understand where your food comes from. If it doesn’t turn you on, don’t put it in your mouth.
“I always crack up when I say that.”
For the many people in Boulder who watched Kennedy grow up, it’s not a shock to hear him say something entertaining. He says people have been telling him he’s a performer his whole life, and this year, Kennedy got the chance to bring together two of his passions in life: cooking and entertaining.
Late last year, Kennedy was off the grid for two weeks in Europe before flying back to the U.S. and seeing he had missed several calls from a number he didn’t recognize. Two months later, Kennedy was selected to appear on ABC’s cooking competition reality show The Taste, wherein celebrity judges including Anthony Bourdain and Marcus Samuelsson challenge competing chefs to produce the best bite possible out of certain ingredients and guidelines.
When the show wrapped up on Jan. 22, Kennedy, only 24 years old, was declared the winner. Kennedy had quit his two jobs as an organic food consultant and private chef in the Hamptons to be on the show, and says the exposure now gives him an opportunity to pursue his larger goals.
“It was never really my goal to be on a reality cooking competition to be completely honest,” Kennedy says. “Growing up in Boulder, and being so connected to the outdoors and healthy foods — both my parents are in alternative medicine — having that ingrained in my being from such a young age, I just want to make a differ ence, and I want to make a difference in the world through food.”
Kennedy remembers sitting in a culinary class at Boulder High, having just read Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential, when he thought he could explore a career in food. At 14, he got a job “illegally,” he says, at Di Napoli’s Restaurant in Boulder, which was started by a friend’s dad. He then worked at Chautauqua Dining Hall before moving on to Hapa Sushi. There, Kennedy says, he was able to move up from making rice to working the pantry and frying tempura, to manning the sushi bar and interacting with customers.
“That was a big lesson because all of a sudden I was making beautiful sushi, which is a really sacred food, and as a 16-year-old white kid from Boulder, one wouldn’t really expect it,” Kennedy says, adding that he had to continually ask himself, “Are you going through the motions or are you paying attention to it?”
He then went on to graduate first in his class from the Culinary Institute of America, earning four awards there, and then earned a degree from Cornell University in hospitality in order to learn the business aspect of the industry. Kennedy speaks eagerly — like a young man who just won a contest on national television judged by some of the best people in his industry — but he says there is a lot of hard work and focus that accompanies his passion and natural ability in the kitchen.
That mindfulness and focus on the singular task is what Kennedy says has sustained him as a chef and sustained him through the competition show.
“It was a really intense process, as you would imagine,” Kennedy says. “The way I managed is I just committed 150 percent. The hours are brutal. I would wake up at 4 a.m. everyday. I would meditate, exercise, have a cup of coffee, jump in the shower and we’d be on set by 5:15. I’d probably get home anywhere from 6:30 to 8 [p.m.]. I would get home, do a little exercise if I didn’t get to it in the morning, study, eat, maybe study a little more and go to sleep. I’d do that seven days a week.
“It was a really big exercise in what I can accomplish if I put everything into something, and that’s not something I’ve ever done before. It was a really beautiful transformative experience.”
Kennedy is an artist, that’s clear; not only in the food he prepares, but in the music he creates, the graphic art collages he assembles and the writing he publishes on his website. For Kennedy, it’s about self-expression and though food is one way to share his story and what he wants to say, he says he revels in the risk associated with sharing something intimate with the world.
“I have a variety of ways that I like to express myself,” Kennedy says. “It’s through art, it’s through music, it’s through food. All of which are great visceral pleasures in life, all of which lead to sex eventually, right? I like to engage myself creatively and put myself out there because I think … being a little vulnerable in the process of whatever you’re doing, whether it’s music or art or acting or cooking, at the end of the day it’s all self-expression. Innately and inherently, self-expression is vulnerable. People are truly recognizing you for who you are. You’re not pretending to be anything, you’re just simply being yourself and putting what is in your heart and soul onto a spoon or canvas or into the air.”
Kennedy says he has plans to return to Colorado, as well as New York (where he lives) and California with pop-up ventures, and he’s currently working on a cookbook. His goal through these ventures, he says, is to keep learning, share a bit of his own story and pass on the stories he’s heard in other parts of the world and in other kitchens.
“When I cook, I really try to transport myself to a place,” he says. “If I’m cooking a curry, I’m envisioning myself in a rice paddy in Indonesia. If I’m cooking a goulash, you know, I’m transporting myself to the Alps or wherever. If I’m making fish tacos, I’m pretending that I’m sitting on a beach in Baja and grilling things up. And I think that plays into that love and intention. One, it makes the experience way better because it’s a mini-vacation. And two, it really transforms how you approach the whole dish. Cooking from a place is really important.”
And so back to Boulder. Kennedy says the connection between farm and table that he tries to pass on through his cuisine was cultivated here in Colorado, and that’s the story that comes through in his cooking. So far, he’s been able to add on to that great story and share it with a growing number of people.
“I never want to tell someone what to eat or not to eat because food is so personal,” he says. “But what I do want to inspire is to be inquisitive and understand where your food comes from. With the food you buy you can either be supporting systems that support the planet or you can buy food that disenfranchises people along the way. If you can understand the story, you can thus consume more consciously and make the world a better place.”
He can’t help but chuckle that his philosophy on food keeps coming back to sex (and he’s certainly not the first with such a connection), but Kennedy says it’s an easy metaphor to show how food is an intimate and communal part of life.
“Let your food turn you on,” he says. “Keep it simple. But have a connection to where your food comes from, and be a little inquisitive.”
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
