‘Dorm chef’ still cooking up fresh food buzz

NEW YORK Jonah Reider became an object of media fascination when he opened a sophisticated supper club in his Columbia University dorm that briefly became one of New York City’s most coveted reservations.

Three years after graduation, the “dorm chef ” is still cooking up culinary buzz.

His club, Pith, has a new incarnation. After a short life in a Brooklyn townhouse, he’s now cooking for small groups at his highrise apartment near Wall Street.

Reider flew overseas this spring to make a television pilot in Japan that features the lanky American presenting Japanese food traditions many younger people there have abandoned. And he’s planning to open a grilled cheese sandwich shop in Tokyo sometime this year.

He’s also launched a U.S. company called Alto that sells honey, olive oil and salt infused with CBD, the legal cannabis derivative, and THC in Oregon.

That’s not bad for a 25-year-old with no professional training and lots of disdain for the “dorm chef ” moniker that made him famous.

“That’s history; I’ve done so much more since then and I don’t want to be identified that way,” he said.

Don’t call him a chef either, he added with a grin.

“I think of myself as a good home cook. The food is upscale, but very simple,” he said, explaining that he’s trying to inspire people to host friends and family at home rather than overspending at fancy restaurants.

“I think the best meals are happening in people’s homes,” he said. “I want to show people how joyful cooking can be.”

Reider’s informal kitchen training started during childhood in Newton, Mass., in a family that loved to cook.

He landed on New York’s foodie scene as a Columbia University senior in 2015, when a review of his dorm meals in the campus newspaper led to wider media coverage and a 4,000-person waiting list.

The university was not thrilled with the young entrepreneur’s venture and booted the economics major from the dorm, but not before Reider won kudos from renowned culinary expert Ruth Reichl.

Since graduation, he’s managed to earn a living as an innovative cook, hired by corporations and individuals to take his unique pop-up creations around the world, from Italy and Japan to Australia and New Zealand.

After Columbia, the graduate rented a room in a Brooklyn hedge fund manager’s townhouse where he staged a series of Pith dinners, with tickets going for $95 plus a $45 wine pairing. He also gave free cooking lessons to public schoolkids.

At that table last year, he met “the love of my life” — a Belgian-born college student whose brother gave her the dinner as a birthday gift.

Romance blossomed and the pair now split the rent for a tiny Manhattan apartment they have stylishly redecorated in an Art Deco highrise with a spectacular New York Harbor view.

The Pith table seats a half dozen guests about two evenings a week. Tickets go for $40.

He posted invitations on Instagram just two hours before the 7 p.m. feast — up for grabs to anyone who was interested, first come, first served. The meal sold out in 10 seconds.

His endeavours in Japan began when he got attention for a Pith pop-up in that country. Later, an executive from a Japanese video production company was in New York and contacted Reider.

The executive invited him to film the pilot for a Japanese show focusing not on top restaurants in big cities, but “the culinary traditions of farmers, brewers, grandmas etc. all around less travelled areas,” Reider said.

“My goal anywhere I go is to highlight home hospitality and culinary traditions,” he said. “I want to show how home cooking connects all of us around the globe. It’s a travel and culture show, happening in homes everywhere.”