“It is probably harder to find a chef without a tattoo than with one,” says Birk O’Halloran, cocreator with Daniel Luke Holton of the new book Eat Ink: Recipes. Stories. Tattoos (Adams). When they started work on the book two years ago, writer O’Halloran, 30, and photographer Holton, 36, were fascinated with tattoo culture and kitchen culture, but didn’t realize just how entwined the two were.
“It used to be that guys with tattoos were seen as unsavory characters, and kitchens were the only places they could get work,” O’Halloran says. “Older line cooks tend to have tattoos that aren’t related to food. But with the rise of the Food Network, you hear the phrase ‘rock-star chef,’ and that culture fully embraces tattoos.”
O’Halloran interviewed and Holton photographed 60 chefs across the country and include a recipe from each. Four have New Jersey restaurants. Scott Anderson of Elements in Princeton; Anthony Bucco of the Ryland Inn in Whitehouse Station; Francesco Palmieri of the Orange Squirrel in Bloomfield; and Marc Forgione of American Cut in Atlantic City. (Click on the links for each of the chefs’ recipes.)
Scars, burns and blisters mark every chef’s body, so tattooing can perhaps be seen as a way to take control of the canvas. The meanings are always personal. Palmieri and his wife, Elaine, each have a neck tattoo of a magpie, a type of crow, “because they mate for life.” Anderson says the latest of his eight tattoos “is on my hand. It is of my wife fishing, and catching a fish on my ring finger….I’m the fish!”
Back in 2011, our Table Hopping blogger, Rosie Saferstein (aka, She Who Knows All) first asked New Jersey chefs to tell us in words and pictures about their tattoos. At last we are able to bring you the fruit of her labors. Click here or click the photo, bottom left, of Strip House’s Bill Zucosky to see the complete slideshow, with comments, of New Jersey chefs and their tattoos.