Eric Greenspan - Jake Fabricius
Eric Greenspan is a chef, the owner of three Los Angeles restaurants, and a former contestant on Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef. Before joining a panel discussion on the virtues of gluttony and feasting, he talked in the Zócalo green room about cheese, superpowers, and cooking on TV.

 
Q: What superpower would you most like to have?
A:
Remember the Wonder Twins—the ones who could turn into animals? My kid likes animals so therefore my kid would like me.

Q: What’s your favorite freeway?
A:
The 10. Definitely not the 405.

Q: What’s the most overrated cheese?
A:
Laughing Cow.

Q: What dessert do you find impossible to resist?
A:
Chubby Hubby. The best Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor ever.

Q: What’s your biggest pet peeve?
A:
My biggest pet peeve—I don’t want to call it laziness—is lack of excellence. I hate it when people don’t give it their all.

Q: What teacher or professor changed your life, if any?
A:
It was a professor at the Haas School of Business, and I was in this class with all these buttoned-up future consultants of America, and there I was—dreadlocks, Charlie Brown T-shirt, acing the class. I said I’m thinking of going to culinary school. He asked “Do you have any debt?” I said “No, I worked my way through college.” Then he said, “As long as you’re doing what you want to do, and can achieve it, do what you want to do.”

Q: On what device do you do most of your reading, if any?
A:
An iPhone. I own three restaurants and do entertainment stuff, and I do everything on my iPhone.

Q: What was the last thing that inspired you?
A:
Yesterday, it was one of my line cooks figuring out how to make a risotto after I’ve been breaking his balls for weeks.

Q: If you could hear just one musician, living or dead, in live performance, who would it be?
A:
Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia. When I saw him live, I didn’t have enough appreciation, like I do now, for the greatness that was Jerry Garcia. Just to get one more chance …

Q: What’s the hardest thing about cooking on TV?
A:
That it’s not real. The best thing about cooking in real life is that you’re cooking for somebody. You’re making a dish and serving it to someone and satisfying somebody. On TV, it’s competition, it’s quantifying something that’s not quantifiable.

 
*Photo by Jake Fabricius.

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