Your Kitchen or Mine?
On the front burner with world-renowned chef Pippa Calland
By John Friel
Photos by Emily Albert

The good news is, a highly acclaimed, European-trained, big-city chef lives among us here in Central PA. The bad news is, she doesn’t have a restaurant and doesn’t want one – not here, not yet. But wait, there’s more good news: You can get her to cook for you. Pippa Calland has reigned as Executive Chef over multi-star restaurants in New York and Philadelphia. Now she operates a private catering service, Chef For Hire, from her home in Mechanicsburg. She brings to the table a decade of experience in the Big Apple, and a solid education from three respected schools: The Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners (Italy), the School for American Chefs (California) and the Institute of Culinary Education (New York), where she’s ensconced in the Alumni Hall of Achievement.

Calland’s portfolio is studded with accolades from food critics, educators and competitions. In 2002, Esquire magazine listed her first among “13 chefs to watch,” a compendium of critic John Mariani’s choices for the best new restaurants in America. “She cooks lustily,” Mariani raved, “with authentic adherence” to Italian cooking principles.

That same year, Calland won the Grand Prize in the Mionetto Prosecco Cook-Off, sponsored by the Italian winemaker. Her work has also been featured on CNN and The Today Show. And just last January, Calland triumphed over three male chefs for the $10,000 top prize in the Food Network contest show Chopped.

Asked to pick a peak professional experience during a recent interview with Fly, she replies without hesitation, “My New York Times review. Proudest moment of my life.” Said review, by Times reviewer Eric Asimov, came when Calland was Executive Chef at Le Madri in New York. Before Calland took over its kitchen, the restaurant was known as a celebrity watering hole, a place for the fashion and entertainment crowd to be seen, not as a serious dining option. It was mostly about the venue, not the menu.

Praising Calland’s “evolved Italian” menu, Asimov concluded that in the past, “(Le Madri) promised more than it delivered. Now, it’s the other way around.”
Calland appreciated the kudos, and loved the surprise. “I’m the stealth chef,” she smiles. “I like for people to have low expectations, and then give them a meal they’ll never forget.”

She credits her training for more than just a knowledge of Italian food. “Studying in Italy took me away from the arbitrariness of American cuisine, nouvelle cuisine,” she says. “Cooking is codified into law in Italy. It’s ancient.” More important than recipes, she believes, is the tradition and a precision that “gives you a spine — a central axis. I have a voice in the back of my head that tells me if something is right, and I trust it.”

Le Madri is Italian for “The Mothers,” a fitting name for a restaurant with an unusual tradition: female chefs. Unlike at home, where women still tend to do most of the cooking, the action backstage at your favorite restaurant is probably overseen by a guy. Even in a restaurant big enough to have an executive chef, a team of sous chefs and a pastry chef, it’s still likely to be predominantly guys.
“It’s a very macho environment,” Calland says. “It’s much harder for a woman. There’s teasing, there’s harassment. You’re not going to thrive if you’re a sensitive sort. You have to be able to throw down as well as, or better than, the guy next to you.”

There’s another reason for male dominance at the stove: “The work is physically demanding. You work yourself to sheer physical exhaustion. If you don’t want your ass in the weeds with a chef screaming at you, you come in hours before your shift to prepare your station.”

Still, from the diner’s perspective, Calland says, “A busy restaurant is better than a slow restaurant. The food is fresher, and the chefs are on top of their game.”
Calland’s break from that hectic existence came when she moved to Central PA to help care for first her girlfriend’s ailing mother, and then her own mother, a former doctor who introduced Pippa to fine dining at an early age. The family moved to New York from Indianapolis when Pippa was 14. She started working for a catering company shortly thereafter, and has been in the food business since, even as a post-grad English literature student.

Now 44, Calland likes to say that “making a salad is like writing a poem.” She eventually came to prefer food to words altogether. “Food is concrete, absolute, tactile,” she tells me. “I prefer that to abstraction.”

Relocating to Pennsylvania inspired a new way for Calland to showcase her talents: In the restaurant world, you go to the food; with Chef For Hire, the food comes to you.

Calland explains, “I come to your house. I bring the party to you. I show up, I do everything, and best of all, we clean up. You’ll never know we’ve been there. Your house is cleaner when we leave than when we arrive.”

There’s no cut-and-dried list of options. “I work with my clients on the menu for an event. It’s very collaborative. You want it to be a consummate experience. I want to create a meal that I’m proud to prepare and they’re proud to serve.”

There are surprisingly few rules about how an event goes down. “You can do as much or as little as you like,” she says. “I can entertain; I can teach. You can help, you can learn, or you can just kick back with your friends.”

There are, however, inviolable commandments about choosing and preparing the food. First: “Buying fresh, straight from the farm, is an absolute mandate,” Calland says firmly. “I need to make money, but I won’t do it by cutting my quality.” Second: “I don’t dumb down anything. I’m not interested in mediocrity. You’re only as good as the last meal you served.” Third: “I’ll never pre-cook the protein. I always do that at the client’s home, so they have that whole experience — all the aromas, and the sense of anticipation.”

Calland’s confidence could be construed as cockiness if not for her track record. She’s walked the talk. When she tells me, “You honestly can’t get a better meal around here than the one I’m going to give you,” I believe her.

“People think they can’t afford me,” she shrugs. “I say, ‘Try me.’” A Chef For Hire experience can run as low as $45 per person for a simple presentation, but a more typical range is $65 to $135 per person for a four-course meal, depending on the ingredient that always jacks up the tab for any meal, anywhere: Wine.

“I’m often given as a gift,” Calland says. “A doctor bought me for his wife for their 30th anniversary. He gave me a very nice wine budget, and I picked out some fabulous wines.”

Might Calland someday change her mind and strut her stuff as chef at a Central PA restaurant? Doubtful. “I’m a true New York chef. I’ve never wanted to open a restaurant here,” she tells me. “I cook like I cooked in New York, and there’s just not a market for that here.” Bummer.

However, the restaurant world may yet lure her back. Maybe not here, but somewhere, sometime. “If I open a restaurant, it’ll be near the ocean, maybe New England,” she muses. “My dream is to do something small, with a set menu, a great wine list and a very small staff.”

Info about Chef For Hire can be found at www.pippacalland.com.