Happiness Is Where the Kitchen Is

By ROBIN FINN
New York Times, February 18, 2007

KIDS, don’t try cooking, or eating, this at home: Uccelletti scappati are tiny dead baby birds that, after being defeathered, dunked, cooked and preserved in a garlic, herb and extra virgin olive oil confit, are held by the beak and eaten whole. Really!

Matt Connors, the chef and owner of the Lake House in Bay Shore, his hometown, and an avowed nonviewer of “Top Chef,” the reality show where toque-worthy humans, some from Long Island, wage war in the kitchen, was reminiscing the other day about the strangest concoction he had ever cooked. Definitely the uccelletti.

... Ask Mr. Connors about Long Island’s true top chef and he defers to Tom Schaudel, above, the irreverent, eclectic chef and entrepreneur who has an ownership stake in five establishments and regularly turns up in the kitchens of two of them, Coolfish in Syosset (he calls it a Le Bernardin for Long Island) and Jedediah’s at the Jedediah Hawkins Inn in Jamesport, a postcard restoration of an 1863 sea captain’s house.

As for “Top Chef,” Mr. Schaudel, whose most beloved ingredients are fish and foie gras — he is adding the words “foie gras” to the heart-and-ribbon tattoo on his chest because, he said, “I’ll never break up with foie gras” — is unsmitten. “These days kids come out of the Culinary Institute saying, ‘I want to be a TV chef,’ ” he said. “I don’t get it. I’d rather cook myself stupid all day than become a cartoon of what I originally set out to be.”

Mr. Schaudel, 53, of Carle Place, started out as a dishwasher at the Sirloin Steak Pub in 1968 “and through a comedy of errors wound up cooking on the line.”

A high school guidance counselor, noting his fondness for black clothing, suggested that he take up mortuary science. With visions of groupies, applause and artistic concoctions, he opted for cooking — less elusive a goal than rock stardom. “Though I guess you could say I am a taxidermist to some degree,” Mr. Schaudel said glibly from the kitchen at Jedediah’s.

He estimates he has owned and sold 17 restaurants (among them, the renowned Panama Hatties of Huntington Station) and cooked at nearly 30.

“It makes me sound like I have A.D.D.,” he joked. “I consider myself an overnight success that took 35 years. I’m like Keith Richards: I haven’t eaten dinner at home since 1967.”