Patrick Asconi, executive chef at Old Gilman Grill in downtown’s exciting West Village, was born in St. Augustine, Florida, but at an early age, his family moved to North Carolina.
It was there that he fell in love with cooking and, being in North Carolina, learned the art of cooking pork.
“That’s when I saw my first pig broken down to be barbecued,” he recalls. “I watched how they used every bit of the pig for cooking.”
But it wasn’t until the Asconi family moved to Virginia that Asconi got his first job in a kitchen and his career path was determined: “I knew then I wanted to be a chef,” he says.
Here he talks about the other cooks in his family, keeping calm amid chaos in a busy kitchen and the career he imagined aside from cooking.