Chef

With its Creole-Cajun-Deep-Southern roots, New Orleans sizzles with creative cuisines and larger-than-life chefs. You may have heard of a guy named Emeril who cooks here or Paul Prudhomme or the Brennan family who runs the famous Commander's Palace restaurant.You may not have heard of Anne Kearney or her French Quarter bistro Peristyle if you live outside Louisiana or even the Big Easy.But in the food world, the 32-year-old chef is making an impact. In the past year, Kearney -- a perky, blond-haired cooking whiz -- joined the ranks of Food & Wine magazine's best new chefs, won a Robert Mondavi Award of Culinary Excellence and was nominated for a prestigious James Beard award.

Tony Sartori hung up his apron last night.After 42 years -- 36 of them as chef -- Sartori has put in his last 16-hour day in the kitchen of Maison Marconi, the Saratoga Street restaurant that harks back to a simpler, and perhaps more civilized, time.Early yesterday, as the soups bubbled and the fabled chocolate sauce warmed, Sartori said he knew his last day before retirement would be a good one."I think about my family, and I know it's going to be a great day," said Sartori, only the third chef in Marconi's nearly 80-year history.

For more than 100 years, from the debut of its first dining car in 1853 until the coming of Amtrak in 1971, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad enjoyed a reputation as the finest restaurant on wheels.Generations of Marylanders who rode the "Beano" -- as locals pronounced it -- to New York or Chicago or Detroit still savor memories of pork chops Normandy, hush puppies, crab cakes, warm apple pie, dumplings, broiled shad or terrapin stew.For former chef Percy Peters, 76, who spent 15 years cooking aboard the railroad's dining and office cars, the memories are as fresh as the rolls he baked daily in a coal-fired oven aboard trains traveling at 80 mph.Peters cooked for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip, presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Wall Street moguls and movie stars, and thousands of ordinary people who rode the B&O in the time before airplanes and interstates changed train travel.

NEW YORK - To see him and to hear him, you'd think Jean-Georges Vongerichten a typical French chef. He grew up in Alsace, on the French-German border, "with a lot of rich food, foie gras and sauerkraut."This genial, 41-year-old "chef's chef," who's been collecting accolades the way Mark McGwire collected home runs, trained in a Michelin three-star restaurant and worked in the South of France, learning and using the techniques and ingredients that for hundreds of years have defined French gastronomy as one of the wonders of the Western world.

The chef at St. John's College in Annapolis nearly choked with rage yesterday when he heard that the school's food was slammed as the worst of 311 schools surveyed by a national college guidebook."

WHEN A CHEF GIVES a simple dish remarkable flavor, there are a few things I want to know. Namely, how did he do that, and can I do the same thing at home?Recently I found myself grilling two different chefs about two different dishes. First I ate some braised sea bass with dried tomatoes, whipped up by chef Roberto Donna at the Great Chefs' Dinner, a benefit for the Child Abuse Prevention Center of Maryland held at Linwood's restaurant. Donna, who owns Galileo restaurant in Washington, was joined in the kitchen by his friend, Francesco Ricchi, chef of Bice restaurant in Washington.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. For the most part that's a good thing -- at least when you're talking about Hampton's, Baltimore's premier luxury dining room.What has changed is the hotel's executive chef, now Craig Scott; his sous chef, now Galen Sampson; and Hampton's chef, now Michael Delcambre. The three worked together for the past six years at big-name resorts before coming to Baltimore. This summer, with much fanfare, they revamped Hampton's menu, promising important changes, bold combinations, lighter foods and less fuss in preparation.

It's after 6 p.m. and things are beginning to speed up in the kitchen at Savannah, the new Southern-American-with-a-French-accent restaurant at the Admiral Fell Inn in Fells Point. An order comes in and Executive Chef Cindy Wolf reads it out."Ordering palm salad, David," she says to David Deutsch, an engaging young man in a backward baseball cap who is working cold food prep this evening. Without pausing a beat, she adds, "Do you know how to do palm salad?"Mr. Deutsch doesn't miss a beat either.

New York -- It's a glorious late-summer morning in Greenwich Village, the sky a slice of pure blue above the buildings, a gentle breeze blowing, temperatures that require a jacket. On West 12th Street, a khaki-colored Trooper swings up to the door of No. 167, and the driver and two passengers leap out and begin unloading: two huge stock pots, two wooden crates of corn, a box of tomatoes, cases of wine, two plastic containers filled with pecan caramel tarts.Thus provisioned, and armed with the tools of their trade -- comfortable shoes, leather kits of personal knives and implements -- the three descend to the kitchen of the James Beard House, where they will prepare dinner for nearly 100 people that evening.

Richard Sax, 46, a chef and prolific cooking writer who taught millions of readers that elegant food could be prepared in ordinary kitchens using everyday ingredients, died of lung cancer Friday at New York Hospital. He was the founding chef-director of Food & Wine magazine's test kitchen and co-author of a monthly column on healthful cooking for Bon Appetit magazine, and author or co-author of eight major cookbooks. His "Classic Home Desserts" won numerous awards.

How much good service matters to you when you've got great food might determine how you feel about the new Alizee. It's a restaurant that has successfully reinvented itself after a recent change of owners, a change of chefs and a change of basic concept. But I'm not sure the management realizes yet that with a change for the better come more customers, and with more customers comes a need for more servers. Certainly the staff was overwhelmed the night we ate there. On a weeknight, the dining room was almost full because of a hotel package tour.

James Michael Crooks, a chef and former co-owner of the Country Kettle Cafe in western Howard County, died Friday of heart failure at his New Windsor home. He was 44. Mr. Crooks was born in Wheaton and was raised there and in London, where he attended London Central High School. After graduating from Wheaton High School in 1982, he went to work in the restaurant business. "We met when we both were working at the Olney Ale House in 1983. Back then, we were young and crazy," said his wife of 17 years, the former Amy Regina Lauer.

Who would have thought a decade ago that Lauraville would become a dining destination? So far it has the Chameleon Cafe and Big Bad Wolf's House of Barbeque, not to mention the Alabama BBQ Company, with more restaurants on the way. Clementine (5402 Harford Road, 410-444-1497) is scheduled to open this week. Owners Winston Blick and his wife, Cristin Dadant, picked the name to reflect both the Southern nature of the food he cooks -- as in, he says, the song "Darling Clementine" -- and its accents of French and Spanish, as in the orange fruit.

Food **1/2 (2 1/2 stars) Service ***1/2 (3 1/2 stars) Atmosphere ***1/2 (3 1/2 stars) I'm not sure how much difference a change of chefs makes to a successful restaurant. No matter how talented the new man in the kitchen is, the owners will want to stick with what's been working. In the case of Kali's Court, that's been very fresh fish and very large crab cakes delivered in an elegant, dressy setting. This winter, Kali's brought in Damon Hersh, when former executive chef Rashad Edwards left to open the restaurant group's newest project, a bistro and patisserie called Meli.

Gerry Garvin struts down the aisle with a black chef's smock, sunglasses, knee-length khaki shorts and clogs to deliver a cooking presentation at a health fair at a local church. As he prepares to make four dishes featuring cherry tomatoes, including ones with clams, mussels, and Chilean sea bass, a woman in the audience begins walking toward the back of the church. "Where you going?" he asks as he prepares the pan with oil. "Don't walk out when I'm trying to do my thing!" Garvin, who is in his late 30s and lives in Los Angeles, does his thing most days on TV One's Turn Up the Heat with G. Garvin.

Bravo's Top Chef, whose third season premiered last week, is back with a vengeance. The first casualty was Clay, a self-taught Mississippi chef. His first mistake was misunderstanding the "Quickfire Challenge," in which he was supposed to create an amuse bouche, or a bite-size culinary creation that teases the taste buds. The concept was beyond him, which is strange since the amuse bouche has appeared in the previous two seasons' challenges. The moral of the story is, if you are going to go on a reality show, watch it first.

Now that local produce, meats and cheeses are all the rage at upscale eateries, restaurateur Riccardo Bosio has decided to fly in an ingredient of another sort: The Chef. At Bosio's invitation, Chef Stefano Azzi is schlepping all the way from Siena, Italy, to Baltimore to make dinner. Granted, it will be quite a meal. It leads off with wine-braised pheasant, pears cooked in Chianti, and chicken liver pate cooked in Vin Santo. Then it's on to octopus salad and sauteed squid. Then vegetable soup.

A new culinary expo hits Baltimore this week. The "Great Tastes" show begins tomorrow night with a "Dine Around Baltimore" event. Several local restaurants - including Taste, Birches, Pazo, Da Mimmo, Vin, Oceanaire and Phillips Seafood - will offer an $85 dinner with wine pairings to participants. Then dessert and champagne will be offered at the Tremont Grand Hotel, the home base for the four-day eating extravaganza. Each of the next three days, one local restaurant will join forces with a Food Network chef to prepare a chef's meal.

Eutiquio Sanz, a retired chef who for more than two decades prepared the celebrated Spanish cuisine of the downtown Baltimore restaurant Tio Pepe, died of cancer Sunday of cancer at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Bolton Hill resident was 66. Mr. Sanz was born and raised in Segovia, Spain. At 15, he became an apprentice chef and began working in some of Madrid's finest restaurants. A decade later, he moved to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and took over as head chef of the five-star Hotel Valle Mar. During the summer of 1983, his cousin Pedro Sanz, owner of Tio Pepe Restaurante at 10 East Franklin St., arrived for a visit in Tenerife and convinced him that he should bring his culinary expertise to Baltimore.

Chef's block. This phobia, like its literary cousin (writer's block), causes the novice to regard an empty pan with as much terror as a would-be scribe does the blank page. Convinced that anything he puts in the pan - oil, butter, a diced green pepper - will taste "wrong," the sufferer of chef's block is paralyzed. There is a cure, according to a trio of local chefs. In fact, they say you can start cooking with the contents of one small shopping bag. Timothy Dean of Timothy Dean Bistro recommends experimenting with large scallops, mushrooms, shallots, garlic, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and pine nuts.