The Coolest People In Food Slideshow

What kind of guy could make orange Crocs seem cool? The same guy who's a regular guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, opened a super high-end Italian megastore in the middle of Manhattan (and has plans to open a few more), and traveled through Spain in a convertible with Gwyneth Paltrow for television (and got paid to do it). Batali also gets points added to his cool factor for being responsive on Twitter, knowing how to party, putting Neutral Milk Hotel and X on the playlist at Babbo, and being a culinary TV star who puts his money where his mouth is, owning such restaurant powerhouses as Del Posto (the first Italian restaurant in 36 years to boast four stars from The New York Times), Babbo, and Osteria Mozza.  

The Berkeley-based Blank has been making documentaries for more than 30 years. Many of these are about traditional music, from Cajun zydeco to Blue Ridge Mountain fiddling to Polish-American polka. But music and food are never very far apart in Blank's viewfinder — see, for instance, his so-vivid-you-can-taste-it evocation of red beans and rice in his Always for Pleasure, a paean to New Orleans culture — and when he focuses on culinary matters, as in the fragrant classic Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers or the exuberant Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking, his passion for eating is unmistakable. The coolest food movie he ever made, though, was undoubtedly Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. The noted German director of that name had bet documentary director Errol Morris that he would never finish his film Gates of Heaven, and promised to eat his shoe if he did. Blank's film shows Herzog cooking said shoe, with garlic and herbs, with the help of Alice Waters in the kicthen at Chez Panisse, then gamely chowing down. Wow.

Three Michelin stars, four stars from The New York Times, four James Beard awards, the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur — if coolness were based on awards and acclaim alone, Daniel Boulud would be subzero. Forget the fact that almost everything he touches turns to gold, that he created the foie gras-stuffed burger, and that his restaurant DBGB pays homage to the much missed punk venue CBGB. In a time when attention has largely shifted away from French cuisine, Boulud consistently makes it relevant, and does it in a way that shows why being French always used to mean being cool and maybe should again.

During his five-year tenure as restaurant critic for The New York Times, Frank Bruni turned the tables on readers and restaurateurs. He was funny, he was biting, and in his review choices, style, and scope, it was always evident that he wasn't afraid to boldly wield the power of the position; this was a critic who for one column tried his hand at waiting tables, and in another piece visited some of the country's most epic fast-food spots. His reviews inspired a blog devoted to Bruni parodies and spurred one thin-skinned restaurateur to take out a full page ad in The Times attacking him, and Eater.com ran a regular feature to handicap his stars. And he did it all while having an eating disorder. As good as Sam Sifton's one-stellar-line-per-column reviews could be, the position hasn't been the same since Bruni left the job to become the paper's first openly gay op-ed columnist.

Yes, Scott Conant is cool. Not because he was a Food & Wine Best New Chef and is generally considered among the contemporary benchmark setters in America's Italian fine dining scene. Not because he's frequently on TV as a judge on Food Network's Chopped, and certainly not because, as it was recently revealed on that show, he hates red onions. But if you follow him on Twitter, you know the chef is just as likely, if not more likely, to retweet people making fun of him than someone paying him a compliment. "God forbid you feed the almighty Scott Conant a raw red onion. He will banish you to Choppedville." "Scott Conant saying someone has too much ego? Oh the irony." When you're comfortable enough with yourself to amplify other people's criticism of you, you're pretty cool.

Chris Cosentino is a former skater who serves diners at his packed San Francisco restaurant things like heart tartare and pork-blood rigatoni with pigs' trotters. He has a shop in the Ferry Building where he sells house-cured meats, he has designed his own shoes and clothing, and he has written an issue of Wolverine, in which he makes a cameo, that's scheduled to hit the comic book stands soon. Need we say more?

When it comes to New York City pizza, this man is a legend. After emigrating from Caserta, near Naples, to New York City in 1959, DeMarco opened Di Fara Pizza on Avenue J in Brooklyn and has been doing it his way, pie by pie, ever since. The pizzas — stretched out dough, ladled sauce, sprinkled cheese, a drizzle of oil, scissor clippings of fresh basil — are all lovingly made by the guy, how and when he wants, and drooled over by lines of locals and tourists in the know. If you haven't braved the masses to taste a Di Fara pie, you have no right to be talking about pizza.  

Best known to TV audiences and cookbook buyers as one of the Two Hot Tamales — with longtime colleague Mary Sue Milliken, her collaborator on the Border Grill restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas — Feniger is a leading expert on Mexican and Latin American cuisine and on international street food. She's also an exuberant personality (try to find a photo of her where she's not laughing or at least grinning broadly) with a magnificent mane of hair and lots of earrings, who once revealed that her childhood hero was legendary athlete Jim Thorpe. Works for us.

In essence, a cool guy is someone who knows who he is and uses his strengths to the best of his ability. So who is cooler than a guy who, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize for his food criticism (as well as countless other awards and accolades), continues to use his influence to shine a light on the small, mom-and-pop restaurants in Los Angeles? Gold — who recently left LA Weekly for the larger canvas of the Los Angeles Times — can write a vibrant, captivating column about an outstanding Thai restaurant in a strip mall located in the middle of nowhere and as a result get throngs of Angelenos to venture there for a meal.  

The general public got their first glimpse of this pastry rock star when he appeared as a judge on Top Chef Desserts, but New Yorkers had long been aware of him through his high-profile stints at Daniel (twice) and then Jean Georges. This "dough boy" looks more like some '50s heartthrob then a modern-day pastry chef, an image his rockabilly sideburns, technicolor tattoos, and passion for riding motorcycles do nothing to counter.

The coolest thing about Thomas Keller is that hes clearly doing exactly what hes supposed to be doing: he was born to be a chef, and has dedicated his life to becoming one of the best in history. Unlike some of his colleagues, who may have started life as musicians or scientists or such, Keller has been working in kitchens for about as long as he has legally been able to work, and his unwavering sense of focus and drive has defined his unprecedented career. Normally, ambitious perfectionists like him are known for being intolerable bosses but time and again, when up-and-coming chefs leave his kitchens to go out on their own and achieve success, they never forget to thank Keller for providing inspiration as a teacher and a friend, in effect reminding the public how cool he is.

In a city obsessed with hamburgers, Pat LaFrieda is the man generally credited with revolutionizing them. Not many meat suppliers get shout-outs in restaurant reviews, but in Frank Bruni's 2009 restaurant review of Minetta Tavern, Pat did, and the Black Label Burger (rib-eye, short rib, brisket, and skirt steak) that he helped develop with chefs Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson was no small part of it — though his famed côte de boeuf helped too. For following his own vision and curiosity against conventional wisdom ("You don't turn dry-aged beef into a burger!"), being a genuine person who hasn't let the attention go to his head, and carrying on a family business co-founded by his grandfather in 1922 — there's a street in Manhattan's Meatpacking District named for the family — Pat LaFrieda should be noted as one of the coolest guys in food.

Some of the best chefs have tried their hand in New York City and failed. With the Manhattan outpost of his Fort Worth eatery Lonesome Dove Western Bistro, Love put it all out there and didn't quite make it. But as much as New Yorkers might not want to hear this, Gotham isn't the center of the universe. And in his native Texas, where he has opened a number of successful restaurants, Tim Love's universe just keeps expanding. Most recently he has launched Woodshed Smokehouse, also in Fort Worth, where the pits and hearths burn mesquite, hickory, oak, and pecan, and the fare includes brisket-stuffed piquillo peppers, 16-hour smoked beef shin for four, and "today's animal" with assorted homemade salsas. Sure, he's a good old boy who does the whole, "We're gonna drink tequila at a morning demo" thing, but he's a nice guy, a real dude, and a great cook.

Morimoto is cool for obvious reasons; his win/tie/loss record on Iron Chef America(16-7-1), his line of beers, and his original style of cooking and uber-creative presenting style are all pretty awesome. But apart from his success as a chef, restaurateur, and businessman, Morimoto epitomizes coolness in his demeanor and sense of whimsy. Who else would dream up creating a smoker for salmon out of ice during the heat of an Iron Chef battle?  

Pawlcyn was doing local and sustainable before a lot of today's local and sustainable apostles could put their Pop-Tarts in the toaster by themselves. She once opened a restaurant in a building shaped like an Airstream trailer (Fog City Diner in San Francisco) and now she owns (among other places) the best restaurant in the Napa Valley that isn't The French Laundry: Mustards Grill. And Pawlcyn comes from Minneapolis, which is a very cool place for a definitively Californian chef to come from.

If you take a look at this Santa-sized master cuisinier, quite possibly the best French cook in America, at work in his kitchen, behind floor-to-ceiling glass, you'll likely see a man consumed with joy at the creative process. Richard seems to glow more brightly with every drizzle of sauce or scattering of garnish he applies to plates; his focus is so intense that you'd swear he's somehow beaming flavor down into his creations. He has found his place in the universe, and has a damn good time there — and anyone who eats his food shares in the fun.

New York City artist Jennifer Rubell may have an impressive résumé — Harvard and Culinary Institute of America graduate, intern for Mario Batali — but most people know her for exhibiting a piñata of Andy Warhol's head or a wax sculpture of Prince William. Rubell, who grew up attending dinner parties with Warhol himself, is something of a food-artist-cum-event-planner. Her larger-than-life food events (where you can eat the art) take an everyday meal and meld it with excess and awe. In Dallas, she's dripped honey from the ceiling onto a ton (literally) of baby back ribs, and in New York, she padded a room with 1,800 cones of cotton candy. And Rubell's cheese plate doesn't come served cubed or on a cheese board: her version consists of elevated, life-sized cheese blocks in the shape of her head, blasted with heat guns, dripping onto stacks of crackers. And you thought food artists just made soup in a gallery for free.

Cheesemonger, like beekeeper, is a profession that just recently became cool again. After turns at famous fromageries like Murray's Cheese, Saxelby started small, with a booth at Essex Street Market. That booth grew into a fullscale shop, and now, she supplies cheese to a number of high-end restaurants, and stocks fromages for Daniel Boulud at his Épicerie Boulud. Saxelby's rise is a tribute to the DIY ethos, and her success shows that sourcing locally and supporting small producers is a viable business practice.

Sure, this pair looks cool. But more than that, they made offal cool in a town where the culinary cliché was as Woody Allen put it in Annie Hall, an order of "alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast." Shook (right) and Dotolo's (left) first restaurant, Animal, sits defiantly two doors down from iconic Los Angeles Jewish deli Canter's, while serving a daily changing menu that includes ingredients like pig ears, pig tails, and pig's head (along with lamb neck, veal, and sweetbreads). The food is delicious, and the restaurant is packed every night. And while the dishes at their new(ish) eatery, Son of a Gun, aren't quite as daunting, the place is just as popular, demonstrating that their food is more than just a passing fad.

For the millions of people who watch Michael Symon on their televisions each day, whether on ABC or Food Network, one thing is abundantly clear — this guy really loves his job. Perhaps the most incredible episode of Iron Chef America happened in season eight's "Battle Cauliflower," when Iron Chef Symon stepped into the ring with challenger John Fraser sans sous chefs. The two chefs put their blood, sweat, and tears into creating five judge-worthy dishes in an hour — and not surprisingly, Symon came out on top.

"I hired Tosi to help us organize our 'office' — a desk in a hallway," chef David Chang wrote in the introduction to the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook. "Instead, she started organizing the company." High praise from a chef who'd already established himself as a phenomenon. Despite being only 29, Tosi has a culinary résumé that includes having worked in the kitchens of Bouley and WD~50 before blowing fellow cool kid Chang away with her chops at Momofuku Noodle Bar and Ssäm Bar. Tosi's outrageously genius flavor combinations and confident risk-taking set her apart from the pack. Many would argue that just by creating her now celebrated Crack Pie and Cornflake-Marshmallow cookies, Tosi did enough to secure a spot on this list.

Before the backlash against so-called molecular gastronomy, Achatz was the substance behind the style of this approach. His culinary pedigree includes training with Thomas Keller, Ferran Adri, and Charlie Trotter. Speaking of whom, after basically being told by Trotter that he was persona non grata, he returned to Chicago and took over the city first at Trio (making a suburb a must-visit destination for anyone serious about dining), and then with Alinea, where course after course, "cool" feels like a horribly inadequate adjective. For his next challenges, the chef took on the idea of a restaurant that completely changes concepts every few months, redefined the way restaurants think about reservation systems, and reinvented the cocktail scene. Now he's even thinking about reinventing aspects of the experience at Alinea. Considering his steadfastly creative approach to food, experience, and progressive cuisine, at 38 years old, Achatz isn't likely to stop impressing us for a long time.