I meet up with Rocco DiSpirito at Augustine, the snazzy Keith McNally brasserie in New York City, where Rocco is fresh off his win on Guy Fieri's Superstar Grocery Games, beating iron chef Alex Guarnaschelli (“she’s fierce!”). Rocco greets me warmly, a copy of his new cookbook in hand (“fresh off the press” he tells me) and, although 51 years old, he could easily pass for ten years younger. Rocco is energetic and engaging, and we get settled in a booth and order a round of drinks as we start to flip thru his new cookbook, Rocco’s Healthy + Delicious.
You may remember Rocco best from his days of running three-star restaurant Union Pacific and launching a second restaurant which was tracked in the television show The Restaurant. Since then, Rocco has reinvented both himself and his food by adopting a healthier lifestyle and cooking philosophy to match it. It all started with a health scare twelve years ago when his doctor told him that he had the metabolic age of a 68 year-old.“One of the issues I was facing was impotency. When the doctor got to that side effect, I was like ‘hold on a second, what else can we do because I’m not doing that!’”. He started eating healthy and exercising, and went from barely being able to walk a block without getting winded to doing an Ironman. “I took the harder path” he acknowledges. “I’d just sold a restaurant and maybe I was ready for a small epiphany. And all the roads starting leading me on this path. In the same six to eight months, my chiropractor asked me to do a triathlon and a friend called who was producing The Biggest Loser and asked me to do healthy food for that show.”
Rocco has been taking his health - and the healthiness of his recipes - very seriously ever since. He started researching and writing and talking to experts and, in his first (mostly) plant-based cookbook, has developed over 200 recipes with low calorie counts and health benefits but with food that “still tastes good – which is the hard part”. Why go plant-based? “I think it’s what the forefront of health and wellness is thinking. Most people haven’t given up meat entirely, but a little more plant-based would be good for everybody. If you eat more vegetables you can’t go wrong. There are no minefields in vegetables.” Although he still eats pasta now and then - "I follow the 80/20 rule that most people have in reverse" - he doesn't feel like it's a sacrifice and gets his motivation from knowing that "I don’t think I could be, at 51 years old, doing what I’m doing if I wasn’t living a healthy lifestyle.”
The book covers the gamut of recipes from smoothies to small bites to salads to cauliflower risotto ("that's a popular favorite I make for my friends") and even includes healthy chocolate desserts. There are new takes on traditional favorites, as well, like making a pasta dish but using handmade protein noodles instead of flour.
The book fits within any particular diet you may be on, he tells me, and he points out that the glossy pictures of the Instagram-ready food scattered across the pages "give the cookbook an updated feel". It’s clear that his knowledge of health is broad and he easily throws around terms like FMT (he's considering trying it but you probably don’t want to ask him to explain what it is) and cannabis oil (it helps him get to sleep), and shows a genuine interest in health knowledge and concern for others (he asked me what probiotics I use (for the record, he uses RenewLife)).
What keeps him motivated to stay healthy? “Maintenance, for me, meant developing a meal plan, and ultimately creating a meal delivery service. I deliver my food to myself, the same way I do with my 29 other customers.” Rocco tailors his food plan to the individual needs of each client, monitoring them with Fitbits and smart scales and coordinating with their doctors. One of his most rewarding achievements has been watching the health changes transform his clients lives. “I was able to reverse diabetes on a 70 year-old man in 90 days. He reversed his disorder so quickly that he was able to go off three medicines that he was on for blood pressure and diabetes.”
“I think that sometimes I learned to cook so that I could do this” he muses. “Cooking has always been very gratifying, of course. Cooking to make someone happy is a wonderful feeling. But cooking to save someone’s life –that’s really cool.”
Would he consider opening a restaurant again? "It’s interesting - for a long time I haven’t felt like I had anything new to bring to the restaurant industry like I did when I had Union Pacific. Back then, what I was thinking and doing was unique. But now I think America is ready for healthy, almost-fine dining. So I’ve been thinking that it would be great if there was high-end dining that was healthy-ish or even gluten-free or low dairy or low in refined sugar. I think a lot of people would like to be able to budget their calories at a restaurant the same way that they budget their dollars.” What's one thing he would like to tell his 20 year-old self? "We would have to have a sit down – it wouldn’t be a quick conversation! I like the risks that I took as a young kid and the ambition that I had at 20 years old. But I would have told myself to slow down, to keep quiet more. It definitely would have served me to zip it.”
Keep talking and inspiring Rocco; keep talking.