Kitchen Karaoke

Chopping the hours away at Open ChefAMe.

by Drew Lazor

I WATCH A whole lot of Top Chef, which means I have a whole lot of inaccurate ideas about what it's like to cook on the clock. "Y'all have an hour to make an entrée out of fruit cocktail and Chili Fritos!" I like to yell at the TV while drinking. "What is taking you so long?" Now that I’ve participated in Open ChefAMe, however, I now know just how fast the minutes can melt away while you’re hunched over a cutting board.

Founded in March by local tech guys Jesse Middleton, Louis Brice, Bart Mroz and Evan Kaplowitz, Open ChefAMe (say it like "sesame") is branded as "karaoke for the kitchen" — just as that practice tosses amateur singers into the limelight to provide entertainment/foster humiliation, ChefAMe invites anyone to prove their culinary mettle by feeding their food to a hungry crowd.

The first event was held on March 30 at South Philly’s Langostini. The second, which went down this past Monday at the Dark Horse in Headhouse Square, featured CP's own food writer Felicia D'Ambrosio and local chef Alyssa Shilliday, each presenting three courses to 80-some ticket-holders who paid $35 a head. (Proceeds benefited Philabundance.) "Since I've been writing about food, I have had an urge to prove that I am a good cook and know what the hell I'm talking about," Felicia said of her decision to sign up. Of course, it was my duty as CP food editor to lend an unskilled hand as her sous chef/whipping boy.

I showed up in the prep kitchen at around 3:30 p.m., a full four hours before each team had to drop its first dish on the serving table. I'd barely said hello to Flea and her boyfriend/my fellow sous, Mike, before she tossed me an apron and had me shucking and kernel-slicing to prep her sweet corn soup. Her menu — that soup, gougères (cheese puffs) stuffed with dry-cured ham, watercress and Dijon cream, and Moroccan spiced braised lamb shoulder with lentils, mint yogurt and lemon zest — was selected because the recipes were easy to execute for large groups, Flea told me.

You should've seen me — smashing garlic, flinging flour, hacking veg, almost falling a lot, peeling prosciutto (Mike dubbed my greasy mitts "Parma palms"). The gougères proved to be my most labor-intensive task — sticking to legendary French chef Alain Ducasse's recipe, I worked in dozens of eggs into multiple batches of a flour/butter/milk dough base. One at a time. With a grandma-ish wooden spoon. My forearms look kinda dope now. One other prep highlight for me was frying up two pounds of bacon all at once in a skillet as big and round as a bike tire, which was actually a life goal of mine prior to Monday night.

I fancy myself a decent-enough home cook, but this was nothing like that — the pressure of knowing that a bunch of hungry heads are waiting on you cannot be replicated. When we finished up with literally seconds to spare, I almost expected Padma Lakshmi to pop in wearing some hot-ass top and tell me to put my utensils down and my hands up.

While Alyssa and her husband, Justin, chose to serve her three dishes — spicy watermelon soup, sake-poached halibut and Korean-style skirt steak — all at once, Team CP opted to course it out. The food went fast — so fast, in fact, that we had to turn a few late-to-the-game stragglers away. "The sad faces of the very few people who didn't get a course were upsetting," Felicia told me after the fact. (ChefAMe organizers work with participants to acquire the right amount of ingredients within a specific budget, but I guess some people ate hearty.) "I would suggest to the next chef to make too much food and expect it all to go."

A lot of people told us they loved Flea’s food. I believed them, but I can't co-sign for sure — I was too busy prepping, cooking and serving to actually sit down and eat.

The next ChefAMe is scheduled for June 22 at the Dark Horse. For more info, or to apply to be a participant, visit openchefame.com. For Felicia’s recipes, visit Meal Ticket.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)