Scene Around: Cooking Up a Recipe for Success with RFH Grad Chef Rossi

Chef Rossi and her book at Barnes & Noble
Photo/courtesy of Rossi

Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School (RFH) graduate, chef, radio host and author extraordinaire Chef Rossi has had a double heaping helping of notoriety lately. And it’s not junk food — more like sweet gourmet success to savor.

First, she stumbled onto her own book The Raging Skillet: The True Life Story of Chef Rossi being featured in Barnes & Noble. It turns out that the memoir will be spotlighted for the month of June as part of the book store’s gay authors celebration.

“Rock and rage!! Window display coming soon!!” Rossi said on Facebook.

She no sooner got that news when a friend pointed out to her that she was also featured in another New York Times book review of HOT BOX: Inside Catering, the World’s Riskiest Business. The review rolls Rossi right into the mix of catering chef memoirs.

It talks about how many “masters of the food universe” got their start in catering.

It jumps right into the art of the caterer’s alternative story, which few write about, and Rossi’s bold memoir.

The NY Times story excerpt, by Charlotte Druckman …

“… it’s a subject food media like to pretend doesn’t exist. A few years later, a self-proclaimed ‘punk-rock caterer’ known simply as Rossi (aka Chef Rossi) published The Raging Skillet, which shares its title with her Lower East Side-based operation. Up until now, these memoirs might very well have been the only options for anyone curious about how those pigs-in-a-blanket wind up on cocktail trays or where those plates of beef tenderloin, a staple of weddings and charity galas, actually get cooked.”