Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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From Rolling Pin To ‘Top Chef’ [Moto Chef Richie Farina Comes Home To Cook In Brandon]

Posted Feb 20, 2012 by Jeff Houck

Updated Feb 20, 2012 at 03:19 PM

When Richie Farina turned 16, he worked at Sbarro pizza in the Brandon Mall food court for a little more than a year.

The cooking bug bit him after about six months, when they finally let him make pizzas. Emeril Lagasse was the big celebrity chef at the time. Richie picked up tips by watching his show on Food Network. Eventually, he was making all of the food for the restaurant.

Then one day while walking through the mall, he saw a “help wanted” sign in the window of the mall’s Rolling Pin Kitchen Emporium operated by Karen and Dave West. During breaks at Sbarro, he would sometimes wander through the store looking at the hundreds of gadgets and tools. He applied for the part-time job while going to Riverview High School and was hired.

He caught on quick.

“I’m kind of a competitive person, so I always wanted to be the person who sold the most stuff or had the cleanest section,” he says.

That was especially true during the holidays, when the knife company Wusthof would have promotions that gave sales associates discounts if they sold enough cutlery.

“I remember that he was a good seller,” Dave West says. “I also remember the puka shell necklace he used to wear.”

Richie dug it when a shopper who only wanted one knife would walk out with an entire set after a helpful prod. With one of the discounts he’d earned, he bought an 8-inch Santoku knife with scalloped edges along the blade.

When a customer would return an item, Karen West would let Ritchie take it home instead of returning it to the company. Soon, his mom Mary Grace’s kitchen was stocked with all sorts of kitchen tools.

Saturated with a love for cooking, Richie left at age 18 to get a culinary arts degree at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island.

The first month was intimidating. He didn’t want to be known as the kid who messed up. Using the knives he worked for at the Rolling Pin, he soaked in all the classes in basic techniques such as searing, broiling and poaching. The chef who taught the garmangier class saw he had talent for carving ice and hired him to make decorative sculptures using chainsaws and chisels.

After graduation, Richie moved to Boston and worked his way up the food chain in three restaurants before taking his knives and relocating to Chicago to become chef de cuisine at Homer Cantu’s wildly innovative restaurant Moto.

Meanwhile, a few years ago, Richie’s sister convinced him to try out for “Top Chef,” Bravo’s reality TV cooking competition. He got the nod to be on the cast for the current season, based in Texas.

Unlike other seasons, where the opening cast was selected by producers, Richie had to cook his way onto the show, beating out more than a dozen other chefs.

He was excited to be on the show, mostly because his buddy at Moto, Chris Jones, also made it to the cast.

All did not go well, though. In episode 4, Richie ran into a chili cook-off that went from bad to worse. His final dish, a Frito-encrusted pork tenderloin with potato hash and ricotta cheese chili purée, didn’t make the cut.

So when “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi told him to “Please pack your knives and go,” the blades he took with him were the ones he earned while working at the Rolling Pin. By then, his prized Santoku blade had been used so much in his decade of cooking, the scallops had been sharpened away.

Last weekend, Richie came home to do two days of cooking demonstrations at the Rolling Pin, which moved out of the mall to Badlands Drive after he left for the big city. The cramped store he worked in now has a full-size demonstration kitchen with glitzy motion-activated cameras and flat-screen TVs.

It was his first time doing a cooking demonstration. With his mom doing prep and his father Peter wearing a Team Richie T-shirt, Farina made Braised Chicken and Roasted Beets with Puffed Rice and a dessert that looked like a chili dog with cheese

The demos were Richie’s way of paying back the Rolling Pin.

“Before I worked here, I had no idea how much stuff there was to use in the kitchen,” he says. “It gave me a leg up going into culinary school.”

Here’s a gallery of pics I shot while Farina was getting ready for his second demonstration: