Photo Credit: Loren Ekart
I met up with Chef Adam Kenworthy at one his favorite spots, Cafe Clover, in the West Village, to discuss both the highs and lows of his past year. After placing our order of roasted beets, winter vegetable stew, organic Scottish salmon and quinoa tagliatelle, I congratulated Adam on his win on Food Network’s Chopped. He tells me that when they initially contacted him he was flattered but, given that he’s primarily a vegan chef, wanted to ensure that being on the show would feel authentic for him. "I told the producers ‘If you give me a can of spam, I’ll use the can but I'm not using spam’." Fortunately, the theme that the producers had in mind was clean eating and he happily accepted. Under strict time restraints, he had to cook an appetizer, entree and dessert in a series of rounds, with one competitor eliminated in each round, until he was the last one standing. “I felt a lot of pressure leading up to the day of the taping because I’m weak on desserts. I tried to prepare myself with the resources I had; I tried to be well-rounded for the show. I spoke to my friend Anne Burrell and she told me - you have to pick a direction and stick with it - and that’s basically what I did.”
Adam excelled at the challenge, cooking one of his signature "sexy salads" for the first round, shirataki noodles (“zero calorie noodles with a soy derivative”) with pickled cucumbers in kombucha, asparagus with sesame oil and seared tuna on top for the second round and, for his third round, crepes stuffed with a frozen dessert and kaniwa with raspberry reduction and caramel sauce. He tells me about one particularly entertaining back-and-forth with the judges that was left on the cutting room floor, where the judges tried to get under his skin by commenting on how hardened his caramel sauce had become. “In response, I said ‘well this is a healthy cooking episode so I purposely didn’t put a lot of cream and butter in it’ and the judges had nothing to say to that! I was laughing afterwards because it was a good touché.” He won the episode and the prize money of $10,000, but takes it all in stride, confiding that “I’ve taken an approach in life where I don’t celebrate my success and I don’t beat myself up for my failures. I don’t think I should be defined by winning just as much as I shouldn’t be defined by losing if I lost.”
Winning that episode had extra special meaning for him, however, as he dedicated the competition to his father, his "hero". On May 19, 2016, him and his father were in his father’s biplane in Iowa taking a joyous final flight before his father sold the plane, when the engine malfunctioned. At the time, Adam had taken his seat belt off to reach into his bag for his camera. As they headed towards the ground, his single focus was to buckle his seat belt, but it wouldn't clip together. As they neared the ground, seat belt still unbuckled, he braced for impact. "I heard my dad say ‘we lost engine power, we’re going down’ and then I hear the runway tower saying ‘the runways is yours, make it to the runway’ and I hear my dad say ‘we aren’t going to make it to the runway, we’re going down’. I braced myself for impact and my dad said ‘hang on buddy’ as we hit the ground at about 80 miles an hour. My dad skipped the plane so we would bounce on the ground and go over the ravine and then straight into the bank at 50 miles an hour. Once we were stopped, I felt a little bit of blood but not a lot, and my knee was sliced across the kneecap. My dad was yelling ‘you have to get out, there is gas dripping’ and I got out and helped my dad get out of the plane and called 9-1-1. My dad was clearly in pain, and had blood in his mouth and had chest pain so I was nervous he had hit his heart. He had gotten me to the ground safely, so now I felt that it was my job to get him to the hospital safely.”
The full effects of what had happened didn't fully hit him, though, until he saw his sister and mother at the hospital. "Seeing them, it hit me that they just about lost their uncle and their grandfather.” To his credit "and with some fear" he hopped back on a plane to New York City a few days later to tape Chopped and told his dad, who was still in the hospital, that “‘I’m going to win Chopped for you’. When I called him after winning, it was pretty emotional.” His girlfriend, Real Housewives of New York star Carole Radziwill, “was very stoic about everything. She was strong and supportive and she basically said she would have been very pissed if something had happened to me.”
Both Adam and his father have fully recovered since the accident, and it has given Adam a new perspective on life. “I realized that I’m really critical of myself about certain things that don’t matter at all, and it’s a waste of time.” He’s also changed the way he communicates with others. “Maybe this comes from having a near-death experience, but I make it a point to not have unsaid things to people. I try to express my feelings quicker than I normally would.” Although he didn't seek counseling after the crash, he has become interested in meditation and spends an hour a day meditating at a yoga and meditation center in New York City.
More than anything else, he wants to share with others that “you just have to show up. Even if you are afraid, you just have to show up because you don’t know how things will end up. If I had been in my own judgments and said I’m not a traditionally trained chef, they aren’t doing a vegan episode on Chopped, I don’t want it to affect people’s opinion of me because I’m cooking meat … if I had let that self-talk affect me then I might not have showed up.”
He’s showing up to his own life with renewed focus, saying “I want to use my zest for life to really catapult me to the next part of my career”. What would he like to accomplish? “I want to provide inspiration for people to live a healthy lifestyle. I also want to lead more with my creativity. Arguably I’ve always been creative because every day I create a fresh menu but I would like to push myself more as being an artist as opposed to a chef, which I know is a gray area. This year is all about having a gray area.”
If there’s one thing that’s black and white, however, it’s that the world is Adam’s oyster or perhaps, in his case, a sexy salad.
Check out how Adam eats clean here.