Marco Canora - A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great

Copyright 2014 by Marco Canora
Photographs copyright 2014 by Michael Harlan Turkell

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Canora, Marco.
A good food day: reboot your health with food that tastes great/Marco Canora, with Tammy Walker; photographs by Michael Harlan Turkell. First edition.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Cooking, American. 2. Natural foods. 3. Diet therapy. 4. Nutrition. I. Walker, Tammy II. Title.
TX715.C219 2014
641.5973dc23 2013050632

ISBN 978-0-385-34491-3
Ebook ISBN 978-0-385-34492-0

Cover design by Rae Ann Spitzenberger
Cover photography by Michael Harlan Turkell

v3.1

TO MY WIFE, AMANDA,
AND OUR TWO BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTERS,
STELLA AND ZADIE

I vividly remember my first visit to 403 East 12 Street. As soon as I stepped in the door, I was met with curious questions.

The first was: Its really assy, right?

Grassy? I asked.

No assy, Marco repeated loudly, over the bustle of the bar.

It was true. The red wine that Marco had handed me smelled just like a barn. The hints of wet horse ass were unmistakable. This excited me because (a) the Chinon (Bernard Baudry, 2010, Loire Valley) was the best cabernet franc Id ever had, and (b) Id finally found a wine descriptor I could understand.

Marco Canora, of course, is co-owner and executive chef of the James Beard Awardnominated Hearth, where we now stood, just inside the entrance. Prior to striking out on his own, he held various positions at Gramercy Tavern and the famed Cibreo in Florence, Italy. He was Tom Colicchios right-hand man as the original chef of Craft restaurant, which won a James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant during his tenure.

By the end of the evening, I concluded what many others had: Hearth is the most underrated restaurant in all of New York City.

Cooking is not hard. Cooking is not hard. Marco repeated this five times during our evening together. I feel like Ive pulled the wool over everyones eyes as a successful chef in New York City. Anyone could do this.

Cmon, I said as I pointed to my vegetable salad, which was ethereal and juicy (not an adjective I use for salads), easily one of the best salads of my life.

He laughed and waved a hand dismissively. People say, Oh my God! This is amazing! Just dress it while the vegetables are warmit all soaks in. Pour the oil on after the red wine vinegar, and add salt and pepper. Anyone could do this.

And thats the beauty of Marco. He can show you how to pull the wool over everyones eyes in wonderful, ethical ways. Can simple food be elegant? Can delicious food be fast? Can a three-ingredient dishslapped together in five minutestaste like it took hours to make? Yes, and, believe it or not, it can all be good for you, even if it tastes like sin.

I was introduced to Marco in 2009 because hed lost 25-plus pounds experimenting with the Slow-Carb Diet as described in The 4-Hour Body. Hed tweaked and fine-tuned the guidelines to complement his incredible culinary skills. It was a formidable combination and a delicious one. He went from a size 40 waist to a size 35 waist without ever being hungry or bored.

But Marcos not rigidly dedicated to one diet, per se.

Marco has cherry-picked his favorite aspects of many books over the years, testing it all in his kitchen andmore importantwith his stomach. Hes added his own inventions, turned a few things upside down, put a twist on the classics, and created what you now hold in your hands: a guide to making masterpieces without being a master.

Marco is a pioneer, and Ill recommend that you follow in his footsteps. In the wise words of Bruce Lee: Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.

You are in great hands. Enjoy the ride.

Pura vida,

TIM FERRISS

author of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body , and The 4-Hour Chef

Ive been a professional chef and cook for twenty years, the last sixteen of them in New York City. Im a lifer, and I love it. But being a chef means crazy hours and even crazier eating habits. Theres no such thing as listening to your body when youre a chef in a professional kitchen in New York. Awareness of my health and eating habits did not possess an iota of my brain space.

This is what a typical day for me, a working chef, used to look like: I wake up at 10 a.m. and hit the coffee. I dont feel hungry for breakfast because I was out last night, after dinner service, eating and drinking with chef buddies until 2 a.m. Coffee is my sustenance until I get to the restaurant in the afternoonand thats when I start in on the bread. Loads of fresh bread arrive daily, so I swipe a heel of bread and continue picking at it for a few hours. Now its time for a cigarette. I started smoking at age nineteen, but never considered myself a hardcore smoker. As long as my first cigarette isnt until the late afternoon, Im doing all right. So, its now 4:30 p.m. and, if youve added it up, the only thing Ive put in my body is the questionable trinity of coffee, bread, and cigarettes.

Staff gathers for family meal at 4:30 p.m., my first meal of the day. Family meal is meant to be cost-effective and fit for a crowd. Its delicious, but not exactly the stuff Dr. Oz is preaching about. Were talking a lot of meatand not the local grass-fed variety, but the cheaper cuts loaded with fat, growth hormones, and antibioticsor starch-heavy food like pasta and garlic bread. Vegetables? Maybe a small pile of lettuce as an afterthought, but not much beyond that.

Amped up by another cigarette and a final large cup of coffee, I head into service. Six hours of bright lights, heat, speed, and constant stimulation whiz by. Though I tasted dozens of bites and ingested a full dinners worth of calories, it never feels like they add up to a meal. Service winds down, and Im thinking about relaxing with a smoke and a drink. After a few of each, I start to get hungry. I ate lunch at 4:30 p.m., so now that its 1 a.m., Im ready for dinner. Its how plenty of people feel when they finish their day of work, but for most its 6 p.m., and for me and the rest of the working chefs its 1 a.m.