RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
Local carpenter and self-taught cook wants to trade in his tool belt for a chef ’s apron, and he might just get that chance — on national television
Boston native Kenneth Palazzolo is a carpenter by trade, but he says he missed his calling. “I really should’ve been a chef,” he says. He hopes celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay thinks so, too. After all, Palazzolo already won over most of the Los Angeles-based audience of live diners on Ramsay’s newest TV cooking show “The F Word,” which is carried Wednesday nights on the Fox network. Currently in its first season on American TV screens, it’s a domestic version of the same show Ramsay – the producer of such foodie-fan hits as “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Masterchef,” – launched in the United Kingdom years ago.
Palazzolo, with his three cousins, Dom Strazzullo, Louis Strazzullo and Matthew Cronin, appeared on the sixth episode of “The F Word” a couple of weeks ago as the Italian Stallions cooking team. More on how he got there later, but first a primer on the “The F Word,” in which “F” stands for “Food.” Anybody familiar with Ramsay’s explosive made-for-reality TV personality and colorful vocabulary might assume otherwise, but hey, it’s a family show.
The premise behind Ramsay’s latest import is to pit two teams of home cooks against each other in a kitchen contest that’s judged by a live audience. Each team has to serve the same dish for 50 people who must decide whether they’d
pay for the same meal if it hadn’t been served to them for free.
With a name like Palazzolo, you might think he and his compadre cousins would hit the discriminating diners with a plate of frutta di mare or chicken parmigiana. But the challenge before them was to prepare Ramsay’s own recipe for beer-battered, deep fried codfish – in other words, fish and chips. When it was over, 38 members of the audience said they’d pay for the Stallions’version of the British staple – a score that was, at that point in the season, the highest since the show premiered some two months ago. In a subsequent episode, however, another team pushed the benchmark to 42.
Not to worry, says Palazzolo. He still feels pretty good about getting a callback from Ramsay to appear in a final showdown between the top teams of the season, competing for a $100,000 payday.
“Only two teams are coming back,” says Palazzolo, and when the dust settles, Ramsay’s picks probably will have little to do with how many plates they sold. “We talked to the producers, and they told us he’s looking for personality. They said we have personality.”
Born and raised in the North End of Boston, Palazzolo has another cousin who wasn’t on the show – Cousin Vinny, as in Vincent Bono, president of the Boston Surface Railroad Company. Since January, Palazzolo has been coming to work at BSRC headquarters, in the historic Depot Square train station, where he’s framing out office space, hanging doors and remodeling the central atrium into a café to be operated by Annamarie Aponte.
Palazzolo may love to cook, but carpentry has been his bread and butter most of his adult life. He has never worked in a restaurant – a feature of his resume that made him eligible for a slot on Ramsay’s show.
“You’re supposed to be a home cook,” he says. BUT THIS isn’t Palazzolo’s first brush with Ramsay, a guy whose reputation as a hot-tempered kitchen bully with zero tolerance for a bad meal, or a bad chef, is largely a TV put-on, he says.
“He’s a great guy,” says Palazzolo. “I know a lot of people see him on the show where he’s really rough, like Hell’s Kitchen, but he’s a great guy.”
Palazzolo says TV also makes Ramsay looks smaller than he is in real life. Palazzolo describes him as “huge, like a blond Jolly Green Giant.”
In Palazzolo’s family, everybody knows he’s a great cook – it’s in his genes – so when one of his Strazzullo cousins found out that Ramsay was doing auditions for “Masterchef” in Boston last year, he urged him to give it a shot.
He did, and it involved a grueling vetting process – starting with the delivery of a plate of eggplant and meatballs to the Hyatt Regency. There were no on-site cooking facilities for the preliminary audition, so the judges knew they wouldn’t be getting hot-from-the-oven meals. Palazzolo made the cut, but the screening continued for weeks with multiple interviews, video auditions and filling out hundreds of pages of documents.
Finally, when it was over, Palazzolo was invited to compete on the show, vying for a jackpot that might’ve really been a springboard to a new career in the restaurant business: $250,000 in cash prizes, plus a cookbook and other promotional supports from Ramsay’s production company.
But there was a glitch. At the eleventh hour, Palazzolo found out he would have had to tape the show at the same time his daughter, Angelina, was to appear as the hallowed “flying angel” in the annual Fisherman’s Feast of Boston in honor of the Madonna, one of the major events celebrated by the Italo-Americans of Boston’s famously ethnic North End.
In the Palazzolo family, this is an incredibly big deal, because he isn’t just a member of the Madonna del Saccorso Society – a major sponsor of the event – he’s the president. The 107-year-old fraternal club – and Palazzolo’s family – both trace their roots to the town of Sciacca on the island of Sicily, off the mainland toe of the Italian peninsula. Every year the Saccorso Society, which owns a church in the North End, hoists one of its statues of the Virgin Mary during a big parade in honor of its heritage.
The town of Sciacca is so pleased that the Saccorso Society carries on the traditional feast that Palazzolo was invited by the mayor to visit for a celebration of the Madonna in 2014. The society shipped over one of its statues for the event and members of the society carried it through the streets of Sciacca during a festive processional.
Faced with a choice between “Masterchef” and family back in August 2016, Palazzolo chose the latter.
But Ramsay didn’t forget him. When he introduced the American version of “The F Word,” Palazzolo was invited to put together a team to appear during the premiere season.
Palazzolo says his cooking was influenced by parents and greatgrandparents, especially his greatgrandmother, who came from northern Italy when she was in her 20s and lived until she was 108 years old. Palazzolo remembers her making fusilli, a spring-like kind of pasta, from scratch, using a wire hanger to twist up the strands of dough into tightly wound coils.
“It’s just something that’s been in my family,” he says. “With a great-grandmother who lived until she was 108, she influenced my family for five generations living to that age.”
Palazzolo says that what makes his Italian cooking unique is that he has melded styles from both sides of the family tree – drawing on northern and southern Italian traditions. .
“What makes my food really special is that I got it from both sides,” he says.
Palazzolo, who lives in North Reading, Mass., with his wife and children, has been a carpenter most of his adult life, but he dreams of being a chef.
A $100,000 victory bump might help, but even if he doesn’t win he’d still like to have a word with Ramsay – one that begins with H: Help!
“If I get a chance I’m gonna elbow Gordon Ramsay and ask him, ‘Hey, why don’t you help me hang up my hammer for a spatula?’”
“Hey, why don’t you help me hang up my hammer for a spatula?”