Chef Wants Diners to Sop Up Food With Bread

And, Conant said, it was probably a good thing that he got into his second-choice program at school.

Chef Scott Conant says good food, such as his recipe for halibut, comes from balancing simplicity and sophistication.

(Tommy Krakowiak)

"The third choice was, I probably shouldn't say this, but the third choice was hair dressing," he said. "I think that would have killed my father."

That's Some Good Lasagna

For Conant, cooking came naturally, and culinary arts was the only class in which he got an A, besides gym.

"I remember making lasagna, something like this and the teacher saying to me, in front of the chef instructors, 'you're good at this, you know, you have an eye for this, the hands for this,'" he said. "I said 'yeah, yeah, yeah. You're saying that because you want kids to take your classes.'"

Another motivation for Conant to do well? The hottest girls in the high school were in that culinary class," he said, laughing.

Conant grew up in a traditional New England family with what he called the "Norman Rockwell-esque Thanksgiving."

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"Those holidays, those summers, eating lobster and stuff like that, it was really that New England type of upbringing, from that perspective," he said.

Appreciating Simplicity

His mother was a first-generation Italian-American, and his grandfather had a large garden, bigger than Conant's restaurant. Even today, the smell of basil brings tears to his eyes, thinking of his grandfather's hard work in living off the land.

"The simplicity of that food as well, that approach to food that he and my grandmother had taken, you know the Italian side of my family," he said. "I think, that is ultimately the reason how I fell into Italian food. So it was that simplicity and that goodness, that sense of purity."

Conant moved to New York by 18. He often considered the balance in 1990 between American and Italian cuisine. Working at a now-defunct restaurant, Conant said he tried to find his own balance.

"Obviously, you know there are some ideas that need to be honed, and there is something to work toward and obviously you put yourself on a path to kind of grow, and that was the intention from that point on," he said.