Sandee Birdsong (Photo courtesy of Bravo TV)
advertisement
advertisement
|
By DAN RENZI
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Sandee Birdsong was a contestant on Bravo TV’s hit show “Top Chef,” and has now become a celebrity chef in her own right. The former Executive Chef of Tantra, one of Miami’s most exclusive and progressive restaurants, she travels the country working as a private chef at events, cooking multi-course extravaganzas for the social elite.
On May 10, she is bringing her talents back to Miami: together with Josie Smith-Malave and Tiffani Faison, also former contestants on “Chef,” she is co-hosting the VIP Cocktail Reception for Aqua Girl 2008, welcoming the lesbian crème de la crème to one of the biggest events on the South Florida social calendar—as well as one of the largest women’s events in the country. It’s also the first event of Aqua Girl 2008, so party organizers chose Birdsong to help make a great first impression. So of course, everyone is asking the all-important question: what’s on the menu?
Birdsong, one of Florida’s best, is cooking...hamburgers and macaroni and cheese.
Fried macaroni and cheese, to be exact served in little balls. “It’s the worst of all worlds,” she says with a laugh, “combined into one wonderful hors d’oeuvre.”
And then there’s dessert, of ice cream sandwiches. On first glance, it’s not exactly the menu one would expect; but she makes her choices very carefully.
She shouldn’t be judged by first glance, either. Her easy demeanor and Southern twang belie her quick wit and chaotic intellect. She is noted for the “fauxhawk” hairstyle that she wore for years; but she claims she just needed something short, but didn’t want to shave it off entirely, so like many other cooks—including at least one contestant in every season of “Top Chef’s” history—she sported the ‘hawk, just to have “something cute.” Although after a “Saturday Night Live” showed a skit mocking “Top Chef,” with everyone required to have a fauxhawk to be a contestant, she grew it out.
As head chef of Tantra, she was never formally trained in culinary school; she was originally hired as an assistant in the kitchen, but soon won over the restaurant’s owner with her workaholic spirit and her knack for simply knowing what tastes good. Her high-concept, haute cuisine menus are born from her upbringing in St. Simons Island, Ga., feasting on simple seafood dishes infused with a down-home Soul Food flavor. Even now, as a professional chef, she often skips the planning process of creating menus, preferring to cook whatever comes to mind in the moment, gauging her guests’ reactions before making choices of what to cook next. Adventurous, tumultuous, refreshing: the perfect recipe for a Top Chef.
“The lesbian appetite and the gay male appetite are totally different,” Birdsong says, as she sits in her North Miami Beach home, which she shares with her girlfriend. “I don’t know if I would say they wouldn’t like what each other are eating, but what would they prefer, that’s where the differences lie.”
It’s a common stereotype, she says, when it comes to choosing their menus. Go to a bar and you’ll see a gay man order a martini, while a lesbian will grab a beer. “The gay male likes fascinating, erotic, very sexy food, and he has more of an eclectic taste,” she says. “They love to visually see something beautiful on a plate, tiny and dainty, and more organized. Lesbians enjoy more comforting food, something a little more familiar.”
Birdsong herself often goes back to the “comfort” level of food when she talks about being a chef. When discussing her favorite dishes, she names outlandish Asian delicacies—she claims the Chrysanthe-mum Tempura at Yakkosan in North Miami Beach is “delicious”—but she repeatedly goes back to her childhood Southern roots, professing her love of collared greens, cornbread and fried chicken gizzards. Although she agrees passing off a menu with “chicken gizzards” might be a challenge for anyone who didn’t grow up eating them.
“But I guarantee if you had a fried chicken gizzard and I didn’t call it a fried chicken gizzard, you’d continue to eat them,” she says.
The ladies of Aqua Girl can rest assured, however, that their menu won’t hold any unusual surprises. But that’s not to say it will be ordinary. As for those hamburgers she plans on feeding to the lesbians? They’re Kobe beef, served on homemade rolls, with homemade pickles. And the fried mac and cheese is created with fine cheeses, and then rolled in Japanese panko crumbs before being fried to a crisp. The dessert of ice cream sandwiches is made of homemade banana ice cream spread between chocolate cookies, rolled in homemade peanut brittle. It’s a menu even the gay men would love.
“When you cook, you use the best ingredients you can get,” she says. “And when I make those Kobe beef burgers with homemade pickles for the lesbians, they’re going to love them. No one likes to be dumbed down.”
|
