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Bobby Flay At The Borgata: Dishes On Thanksgiving and His Food Future

November 21, 2012 at 12:39 PM | by | Comments (0)

We had the pleasure being invited to the recent Savor Borgata Event in Atlantic City where chefs Bobby Flay, Wolfgang Puck, Michael Mina, Geoffrey Zakarian and others were there food demos and to present a huge culinary showcase for a crowd we were delighted to see come out in droves to support the city just a week after Hurricane Sandy hit.

Though the Borgata and sister hotel The Water Club are not on the Boardwalk, they did feel some of the effects of Sandy, but, as they say, the show must go on—and that it did.

We were lucky enough to spend a few minutes to interview the chefs. We talked about some of their Thanksgiving Plans, and more importantly find out what’s on their hotel horizon.

We spoke with Bobby Flay, after his Thanksgiving-dinner demo where he showed his huge audience how to properly cook a turkey, prepare a spicy pumpkin soup (with chipotles, of course!), convinced naysayers to embrace Brussels sprouts, and bigged up Geoffrey Zakarian's Lamb's Club at The Chatwal as one of his favorite restaurants--despite Zakarian telling us Conde Naster's were getting too fat from his food!

A little more from Flay:

HC: Do people ever get mad at you when you add southwestern ingredients to your Thanksgiving dishes? Don’t they just want plain mashed potatoes?

Bobby Flay: I think they do sometimes. But I’m cookin’, so they don’t have to come. Once in a while my wife asks, "can you just do traditional, traditional?” I just say “No, I’m not doing that.” But, I don’t veer that far from traditional. When you look at my table, there’s mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, turkey, Brussels spouts, and a cauliflower dish. It looks like Thanksgiving, but some things are going to have a few different flavors. That’s it.”

HC: You mentioned at your demo you may come up with a new version of “Throwdown with Bobby Flay”? But what about hotels? Will we see a Bobby Flay restaurant in Abu Dhabi?
BF:{cringes}I have two hotel restaurants at the Mohegan Sun and these burger concept restaurants; we have 12 of those and may open more. My goal in the high-end restaurant department is to redo the things I've been doing my whole life. A lot of chefs do something and then go on and do something else. If I do a restaurant, it'll be relaunching a restaurant in New York. My goal is to reopen a Spanish restaurant I had called Bolo.

HC: Traveling chefs are a big thing. Do you want to be the next Bourdain?
BF:Let’s face it. He’s made a career of criticizing a lot of people. I did that 15 years ago on Food Nation. But, I've learned so much about the food of America, I think of myself as an American chef, so no. I don't think so.

Next week we'll speak to Wolfgang Puck, who's got some exciting hotel plans coming up!

[Photos: Chanize Thorpe/HotelChatter]

Hotels mentioned in this story

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