Stories from the Stage

RUBY CHAN: They looked at me about to pour 400 degrees oil on top of ginger and scallion and said, "We're calling the fire department."

KENNY PALAZZOLO: She gave me my coat hanger and a little ball of dough.

You rolled it around the coat hanger, you pulled it out, and you had one fusilli.

JULIAN PLOVNICK: I was elated to see my own smile mirrored back at me, bouncing off the blades of my very own set of chef's knives.

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "Family Recipe."

Every family has one; a special bit of culinary magic.

Maybe it's passed down over time on handwritten cards, stained, kept in a box somewhere.

Some of those recipes are precise.

Some of them are just a dash of this, a pinch of that.

But either way, it doesn't really matter, because recipes are so much more than instructions.

They are how we pass love; one meal and one memory at a time.

CHAN: My name is Ruby Chan.

I'm originally from New York City, Chinatown.

But now I live in Needham, Massachusetts, and I am the founder of an Asian sauce company.

And when you're an entrepreneur, you have to have your hands in every little part of the business, or at least be looking at it, but I understand that you came from a marketing background.

How do you feel that, that has shaped your journey?

Yeah, it actually has helped a lot because I'm not selling just sauce.

I'm selling a story.

I'm selling our culture.

I'm selling love in a bottle.

Is this your first time sharing a story on stage in a manner like this?

Yes, oh, my God.

It's absolutely nerve wracking.

I have stage fright, and so I generally try to stay away from the camera.

But I know that in order for me to share my culture, I have to be on stage.

And this is my moment because my parents didn't get a chance to have a voice, to be able to share what they believed in, those things that were special to them.

And so I feel like I'm doing it for all of us.

So I grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City, where culture, flavors, and chaos threw a party.

(audience chuckling) You would walk one block and you would smell bagels and bialys from the Jewish deli.

Next block, you would smell espresso and marinara from Little Italy.

And in the middle of it all was my Chinatown.

Hanging ducks in the windows.

Fish in tanks.

That's where I found love with food, flavor and freshness.

That was the community that raised me.

My parents, Yam and Eva, came here with engineering degrees, but no one would hire them.

So, like most immigrants, they started all over, and eventually, they were chopping vegetables, and, um, sweeping floors and working harder than anybody else in the room.

They started their own restaurant, a tiny Chinese restaurant in Clifton, New Jersey.

That place became everything to us.

It was the business, it was the family.

It was my after school program.

But instead of soccer practice, I was answering phones, folding dumplings, doing math homework next to the box of fortune cookies.

But what I remember so vividly was my dad's ginger scallion sauce; bright, bold topping that he served with pan-fried dumplings.

Nothing fancy whatsoever.

But it was magic.

Customers begged to take it home.

And I would say to him, "Dad... "...I think you should shut the restaurants down and just sell sauce."

(laughter) He looked at me and said, "Ruby, head down, stop talking, work harder."

And that was just the rule in the house.

Don't dream, just hustle.

My dad died young, at the age of 52.

And, after finishing up my MBA at Bentley, the restaurant had been sold.

I swore I would never, ever do what my parents did.

I wanted a corporate office job.

I wanted a desk.

And I definitely did not want to smell like beef and broccoli.

(laughter) I traded in dumplings... ...for deadlines, and for 25 years, I worked in marketing, managing campaigns, leading teams, checking off all the right boxes.

But with four kids, tuition, expectations stacked high, it was hard; I was burnt out on all ends.

I would come home, and most nights I would feel like I was on a real episode of "Chopped," where the mystery ingredient was whatever's in the fridge and how much time before someone cries.

(laughter) But one night, I came home totally wiped, and I just threw together what I knew: ginger, scallion, a little bit of oil and poured it on top of chicken.

We sat down, and for once, it was quiet.

No one was crying, asking what was for dessert.

Then my daughter, Kayla, looked up and said, "Mom, you should bottle this."

(laughter) I froze.

All of a sudden, I was no longer in my kitchen anymore.

I was back at the restaurant, hearing my own voice from all those years ago.

I knew what I had to do then.

So I quit my job.

No business plan, no investors.

Just my stove, my sauce, and a little girl who knew it was special.

I started from scratch, pitching it one jar at a time to whoever would take a sample, or just feel too guilty to say no to me.

(laughter) Then, my first lifeline.

I found an incubator kitchen in Boston.

I finally had the right tools, guidance, and a community.

Immigrant mothers, women, all turning their stories into something you can taste.

They looked at me, about to pour 400 degrees oil on top of ginger and scallion, and said, "Okay, love the flavor, "but if you keep doing that, we're calling the fire department."

(laughter) They helped me scale and believe that I had a shot, but it was still hard, still really messy.

Like, my first big retail moment.

I had packed the car with care, drove to Needham like I was headed to the Oscars.

But my jars failed me.

The lids busted open, and there was sauce everywhere.

The seats, the seams, my soul.

(audience laughter) I pulled the car over, took a moment, cleaned up the mess, and just kept going.

Because... giving up just wasn't an option.

But the worst critic of them all: my mother.

(audience laughter) She would look me in the eye and say, "Okay, Ruby, "I did not come to this country to work my fingers raw, "to raise you to get an education, just to watch you sweep floors."

I get it.

She was totally traumatized by the restaurants, the stress, the struggle.

And she didn't want me to go back to what she worked so hard to leave.

I was scared, too.

But what Kayla had sparked in me was stronger than fear.

So at that point, I just knew that this was no longer a hustle.

It was a calling.

And now, every time I make that sauce, I feel connected.

To my dad, who never had a chance to see this dream come true, to my daughter, who reminded me of who I am, and to that little New Jersey kitchen where it all began.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) PALAZZOLO: My name is Kenny Palazzolo.

I was born and raised in Little Italy of Boston in Massachusetts, and I'm a carpenter by trade.

You grew up in the North End.

What was that like, and what do you remember most vividly?

It was, um, a big family atmosphere, is what I remember most, is always going to other people's houses.

They always wanted to feed you.

Everybody had an Italian grandmother, and it was all about family when I grew up.

And so did that sense of family, celebration, eating together, does that carry with you into, you know, is that deep in you?

Oh, absolutely.

Made me who I am today.

Growing up in the North End, you're a different breed, I like to say, when you grow up in Little Italy, and it's been with me my whole life.

So you have a YouTube show with your mother.

What is it like to bring those family traditions to the screen for people to watch?

I feel very blessed to still have my mother and have her be as vibrant as she is.

I can put her in front of the camera and cook with her.

She has so much to offer.

And I hope that people try our recipes because they've been passed down from generation to generation.

But I feel very fortunate to have my mother with me and have her on the show and be able to share our family recipes.

Over the years, many people have asked me where my love and passion for food and cooking came from.

It was 46 years ago, when I was six years old.

My great-grandmother, Nonna Adelina.

Nonna Adelina was a very special woman.

She was born in Montefalcione, Italy, in 1887.

She came to America in 1908.

She was 21 years old.

She didn't leave us till New Year's Eve Day, 1995.

She was 108 years old.

And she influenced my family, not just in Neapolitan cooking, but the Neapolitan way of life.

She was here for 87 years, and she never spoke a word of English.

If you didn't speak Italian, you weren't talking to her.

In all of those years, you either spoke Italian or you didn't talk to Nonna.

I remember my very first memory, six years old, and my great-grandmother would knead that dough.

And I remember because she was in her 90s and her knuckles were, you know, swollen with arthritis.

And I remember watching her knead that dough and knead that dough and knead that dough.

And I could see in her face that it hurt, but it didn't bother her.

She kneaded that dough, and she put it in that bowl, and she put the cover over it.

And then she went and watched the mass.

My Nonna watched three masses a day.

She watched her mass, the dough would be ready, and we would sit down at the table.

And the first thing she gave me was a broken piece of metal coat hanger.

She gave me my coat hanger and a little ball of dough.

And she took her little ball of dough and we rolled them out.

And you got the coat hanger and you put it on the edge and you rolled it around the coat hanger.

You pulled it out, and you had one fusilli.

(audience laughter) And we put it on the towel that was on a board, and we'd fill the board, and she would take it in the bedroom, and she'd slide the towel off onto her bed and come back with another towel and the board.

And we continued to make fusilli all day long until we had enough fusilli to feed the family that night.

You know, it was her love and her passion and her teachings that created my love and passion for food.

The second memory that I have is I was ten years old.

There was a very famous bakery in Little Italy called Bova's Bakery.

It was established in 1932.

And I lived directly across the street.

And by the time I was ten, the Bova family, they were in their third generation and there were six brothers and sisters.

And each brother and sister ran the bakery for a six month period.

And my father, Big Benny P., he was very good friends with Gilda Bova, one of the siblings.

And when it was her turn in the summer, he got me a job working in the bakery.

So when I came, 8:00, 9:00 at night, I went back there in the bakery, I learned how to make bread, seeded rolls.

I made spuckies, and bastones, scali bread, and French bread.

And then we went to pastries and I made cannoli shells and we made cream puff shells and cookies.

And this happened all night long.

All night long, we made bread and cookies and pastries.

And Gilda, she had two sons, Joey and Anthony, and they helped her run the bakery.

And Anthony was a short, little Italian guy with long hair and a big Italian nose, and he looked like a penguin.

So his name in the North End was The Guin.

Everybody called him The Guin.

And one night The Guin comes to me and he says, "Kid, we're gonna make pizzas."

And I'm ten years old, I go, "Anthony, I don't know how to make pizzas."

He goes, "Don't worry, I'm gonna show you."

And the next night, I come in, and Bova's had a little side storefront, couple of little windows and a door that you could see into the back of the bakery and get the smells coming out of that screen door.

And he cleaned up that little window area.

The first night I came in, brought the rack of dough over and stretched a couple out.

And he said, "Have at it, kid."

I probably ruined six, eight pieces of dough that night.

I put my hand through one, one fell, one was, he looked at it, he goes, "What's that?"

"I don't know."

At the end of the night, I says, "Anthony, I'm sorry," I says.

He goes, "Don't worry, kid."

He goes, "We're going to do it again tomorrow night."

Tomorrow night I came, more dough, six, eight pieces by the end of the night, you know, and it's late, it's like 1:30, 2:00 in the morning.

I finally had a piece of dough on the peel that looked like a pizza.

And I says, "Anthony," I was excited.

"Anthony, hey, at the pizza."

He goes, "Tomorrow, we go live."

Now, Anthony was a very famous guy in the North End.

He owned one of the most famous bakeries in Little Italy.

So the first night, 15 pizza orders come in.

I go, okay, I got 15 pizzas.

The next night it was 20 pizzas.

The next night it was 25.

By the end of the week, I had 50 pizzas.

And Bova's is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Never closes.

You know, back then, when the bars and the clubs let out, that's the only place you went that was open at that time to go get something to eat.

And what started to happen was people would go in, get something to eat, and they came around and they started watching me.

And they started watching, you know, this little ten-year-old kid at 1:00 in the morning and I'm stretching pizzas in the window.

And the more people that came, the more excited I got.

And I started, you know, I started practicing and I learned how to slap the pizza side to side.

I spun it this way, and I spun it that way, and, and I just remember saying to myself, "I love this."

(laughter) And I think back to, you know, my great-grandmother and The Guin and everything they taught me.

And I was really young, but, you know, you're never too young to realize what your passion is in life.

And if you follow it, you can end up like me.

A guy who made fusillis at six years old and threw pizzas at ten, who now has a white apron from "MasterChef."

Thank you, guys.

(cheers and applause) PLOVNIK: My name is Julian Plovnick.

I'm originally from Brookline, Massachusetts, but I live in Brooklyn, New York now, and I'm a chef and recipe developer.

I'm wondering, can you think of a particularly complex recipe that you've developed, like, what was the most, you know, what was just the most out there?

Took the most work?

I'm really curious.

The most complex one I did was probably this white chocolate raspberry mousse layer cake.

It just had a lot going on.

There was a raspberry mousse, there was the cake, there was a buttercream.

There was decorations of like chocolate covered strawberries.

And finding a way to make that like, palatable and like still pleasing to somebody to want to make was a lot, so.

But it turned out okay.

There is the basic, this is what we're cooking.

Here's the steps of it.

But storytelling is a huge part of that.

Can you talk about the role of storytelling in your work?

That in particular is something that I really love about cooking and recipe development is when you understand why what you made is what you made, right?

I think that makes you enjoy it more, right?

You have more of a history and an understanding to what you're making, so, if you can understand the story of the recipe, I think it makes it taste better, honestly.

So I try and include it if I can.

For as long as I can remember, I have always been obsessed with food.

The first meal I ever cooked was a frozen salmon Florentine filet from Trader Joe's with a side of mashed potatoes so lumpy you might have thought that I folded raw ones throughout it.

Throughout my childhood, I picked up and put down various hobbies, each one unable to hold my attention with the same level of intensity that cooking did.

I would sit on the couch for hours watching chefs like Michael Chiarello and Emeril Lagasse and Ina Garten move throughout their TV kitchens with a rhythmic purpose that felt so second nature to them.

Like, throughout their lives, their hands had only spent minutes away from the handle of a knife.

When my parents would finally decide that I had stared at a screen enough for a day, they would unplug the tiny white box of a TV that sat in our living room and hide it away in the back of their closet.

I would pretend not to know where they hid it, only to dig it back out once they stepped out for a few moments so I could catch the end of the "Top Chef" episode I had been watching.

A few years later, when it came time to request a Bar Mitzvah present, I only had one thing in mind: my very own knife set.

Now, some parents might have been apprehensive to buy their 13-year-old a set of razor sharp professional knives, but not my parents.

Either because they wanted to nourish my one and only passion, or because they were hoping it would make the food that I made them a little more edible.

But either way, on the day of my Bar Mitzvah, I was confused and a little bit disappointed when my father presented me with a giant metal briefcase.

Once we undid the factory set combination at the top of the case, I was elated to see my own smile mirrored back at me, bouncing off the blades of my very own set of chef's knives.

Now my love for food has only wavered once in my life.

It was a normal night in fifth grade.

My family was sitting around the dinner table eating Boca burgers and frozen French fries when my mom asked for my and my brother's hands.

We gave them to her and held hers tighter and tighter as she explained to us that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

In all honesty, my mom wasn't the healthiest of people.

She had struggled with fibromyalgia since she was in her late 30s, and would sometimes walk with a cane to help support her.

She had me later in life, against her doctor's wishes, and would sometimes call me her "miracle baby."

As she was told time and time again, she wouldn't survive another pregnancy after my brother.

What she lacked in physical health, she more than made up for in charm.

Originally from Virginia, my mom was an eccentric, artistic, downright force of a woman.

Her colorful fashion and lively demeanor drew eyes to her in every room she went into.

People would flock to her with a magnetism that can only be described as kind of scary.

It seemed like everywhere we went, my mom knew somebody and that somebody loved her whether she loved them or not.

(audience laughter) It was this same magnetism that came into play when my mom started her chemotherapy.

As her treatment began to ramp up, a group of my mom's friends, other moms from the middle school, who I'll now be referring to as "Margaret's Angels," came up with a plan.

A couple times a week, a different family from the community would drop off a hot and ready meal for us, completely absolving my parents of their dinner duties for the night so that they could focus on my mom's healing.

Now, the range of meals was... ...wide, both in cuisine and quality.

Um, sometimes we'd be treated to a juicy roast chicken with vibrant fresh vegetables and chewy chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

Other times, we would all leave the dinner table with a different... ...conclusion as to what it was that we had just eaten.

(laughter) But if I'm being completely honest, 70% of the time, we got lasagna.

Tray after tray of gooey, sauce-laden lasagna.

Now, before my mom's cancer, I had no problem with lasagna.

In fact, I even liked lasagna.

I particularly loved the crunchy bits of pasta that stick out of the bottom of the pan and get all nice and caramelized under the broiler.

But over time, as my mom's treatment progressed, those tiny bits of pasta began to taste less like a smoky treat and more like chewing on a hospital gown.

As my mom's cancer progressed, so did my hatred for lasagna.

I mean, I can only imagine how the Angels must have felt when I would answer the doorbell, look at the tray of lasagna in their hands and roll my eyes in disgust.

I mean, if anything, I should have been grateful for all of the love and the support that these families in our community were showing us.

But I couldn't be.

Over time, all of the pain I felt, all of the confusion and grief and anger at the disease that was eating away at my mother from the inside out.

The vicious, seemingly unstoppable force that was desperate to rip her from my life and never give her back.

I channeled it into the lasagnas.

To this day, I still can't eat lasagna.

I mean, I can barely stomach this stuff.

But looking back, Margaret's Angels dinner drop-off service did so much more good for my love of food than bad.

As family after family visited our house, I learned so much more about the intrinsic connection between food and community.

With each plate of food, I learned which families only shopped at Whole Foods and which ones valued healthy options.

I learned which ones didn't care what we ate just as long as we were happy.

I learned about different cuisines and different cooking styles.

But most importantly, I learned how food can hold meaning.

Food can hold anger.

It can hold grief.

It can represent a desire to live a healthier lifestyle.

It can represent a place you miss or a place you don't.

It can be so filled with love that it could be downright unbearable to eat, but you'd still clean your whole plate.

It can create a relationship.

One that says I see you.

One that says I've got you.

One that can't be summarized into words but can be summarized into some flour, some eggs, some sugar, some butter, some chocolate chips for good measure.

It's this idea of cooking food with meaning that helped me realize that I needed to become a chef.

Whenever I cook, I feel my mom with me.

Now, I wish it was as sweet as it sounded, but in all honesty, it's complicated.

While yes, I feel her warmth around me and I see her slightly crooked smile as I bite into a ripe peach, I also understand how her pain inadvertently fueled my passion.

Her battle with cancer helped me realize what I love so much about food.

But it also took her from me.

So it's complicated.

It's confusing.

It's layered.

Kind of like a lasagna.

(audience laughter) Thank you.

(cheers and applause)