Who

The former star chef Rocco DiSpirito doesn't have a kitchen to cook in these days, but Rocco fans need not despair: The fame-hungry chef will probably turn up somewhere any moment now.

Backstory

Queens native Rocco headed off to culinary school at the CIA when he was 16 and trained in Paris and New York (at the restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel), before moving to Boston to attend college at BU. He stayed in Boston after graduation, working briefly at the Four Seasons and then as personal chef to Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall and her husband, former Times columnist Anthony Lewis. DiSpirito returned to his hometown of New York City in the early 1990s and took jobs at Gray Kunz's Lespinasse and the short-lived (but well-received) Midtown restaurant Dava. But he didn't really arrive on the food scene until he launched Union Pacific in 1997. After earning two stars from Ruth Reichl in the Times (she bumped it up to three stars in 1998), Rocco soon developed a reputation as one of the city's most promising young chefs and won a coveted "Best New Chef" award in 1999 from Food & Wine.

Of note

Given the buzz surrounding DiSpirito in the early '00s—not to mention his general foxiness—it wasn't altogether surprising when NBC picked him to star in a food-centric reality TV show. Debuting in 2003, The Restaurant followed DiSpirito as he teamed up with Jeffrey Chodorow to launch an Italian eatery on 22nd Street named Rocco's. Alas, DiSpirito's restaurant almost immediately wilted under the klieg lights: the food was panned, DiSpirito spent more time flirting with customers than cooking in the kitchen, and he started squabbling on-camera with the notoriously nutty Chodorow. It wasn't long before Chodorow shut down the money-losing restaurant, shortly after which NBC pulled the plug on the TV show. Things went from bad to worse when Rocco was fired from Union Pacific a week later.

Since the demise of his show, he hasn't exactly been hurting for cash. Thanks to a line of cookware, books, product endorsements (Ford, Bertolli frozen dinners), his mama's meatballs—which he boasted about on his TV show and now markets via QVC—and a short-lived stint on Dancing with the Stars, the Rocco empire soldiers on.

Personal

In 2000, DiSpirito divorced his college sweetheart Natalie David. Since then, the baby-faced flirt has dated actress Yvonne Scio, model Sena Cech, and writer Deborah Schoeneman, among many others.