What Chef Andrew Carmellini Can’t Live Without

It’s a little bit of a routine. I call it my rock-and-roll past. It’s not an original fashion statement, but it is my most useful one and everyday one. I literally do have a drawer that’s full of only Todd Snyder Made in L.A. black T-shirts. It fits me perfectly, and it’s not super-baggy. It’s the right softness-to-roughness ratio. I do like that they don’t change it.

It really is one of those things that’s always in my fridge. That’s a Kalustyan’s find. Kalustyan’s used to have the guy who made sandwiches on the second floor, and that was always a go-to sandwich situation for me. They did a vegetarian pita sandwich there, called the Mujaddara, and it had lentils and fried onions and yogurt, and it would come with two of these pickles. I mean, this is like 25 years ago, and then fast-forward, I discovered that they also sold them there. It’s a Lebanese cucumber, which is a very, very thin cucumber, thinner than the Persian cucumbers that they sell now. It’s just the perfect snap. I wouldn’t call it a distinct pickle flavor; it’s just the right size snap. Honestly, at this point, it’s almost nostalgic, at least for me, because that sandwich was one of my go-tos.

I’ve been playing music my whole life. I play almost every weekend. In my other life, I’m a world-famous record producer. I was either gonna go to Berklee or cooking school. I have 12 synthesizers, and the Moog in particular is the 1970s analog in a box. It fills the room with this wall of sound. It’s very simple, and for anyone who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, it’s very nostalgic. It comes around again every ten years. Bruno Mars probably used it on his last album. It’s part of any kind of retro sound, and it’s just comfortable.

This is the best version I could find doing a quick search online, but I picked one up downtown 20 years ago at, I think, Club Monaco. I actually have a vintage one, too. I can wear it as a blazer. I can wear it as a light fall jacket. I can wear it as a light spring jacket. It has a personality of its own, and you don’t see that a lot.

I grew up on country and jazz and the blues, and it was just one of those things that the players would wear. My dad would bring us to concerts when we were kids, and those players would wear them. So that’s why we call them dude hats. My brother wears them, my dad wears them, I wear them. They’re not unique. Some Brits call them hooligan hats. JJ Hat Center on Fifth Avenue calls them flat hats or newsboy hats. My nieces, when they were younger, called them old-people hats. I have them in summer weight, winter weight, tweed, linen. It just depends. I do sometimes wear them in the kitchen. When we opened up Cafe Carmellini two years ago, I was wearing one of the khaki ones in all the opening photographs. It ended up being, for whatever reason, my lucky hat, if you will, those three months.

I grew up with cars and racing and all of that stuff. It’s part of my DNA. I also lived in Europe for a couple years and fell in love with the high-end stuff and Formula One. If you want to have a hybrid in between all of that, this is something you could drive every day, and especially drive in Manhattan, out east, or upstate. This is my third one, and I really love it. I think it’s classified as a crossover SUV. It’s a smaller version of it. It drives like a sports car, though. That’s why I love it. It’s basically like a sports car with a back seat. It can fit five people total. Mine’s black. Black rims, all-black everything. I’m lucky in that I’ve driven everything, all the dream cars, and for something you can drive every day but still feel like you’re at the race track in the way it accelerates, in the way it corners and all those things, this is the one. I don’t have any kids, but we have luggage and stuff. We’re always hauling something somewhere.

I bought it at Mandolin Brothers on Staten Island. It was new then, in 1992. That particular guitar-maker is a much larger organization now. They’re made on the eastern shore of Maryland, but back then they were a small shop, and the wood is older wood. It’s a more handmade instrument than a machine-made instrument. There’s a lot of sound quality that comes out of that, and a lot of resonance that comes with it. Out of all my guitars, that’s the one that just sounds so deep and amazing, no matter what kind of music you’re playing. If you’re playing more jazzy things or more rock things or something super-heavy, it’s an amazing tone. It’s definitely the one I use the most. I have quote-unquote fancier ones and more vintage, expensive ones, but it’s the one I use the most. It sounds so good. It makes up for poor playing.

My grandmother gave me this book in 1981. It’s kind of an A-B-C collection of the natural wonders of the world. It has places around the world that are natural phenomena or have geological features or beautiful scenery or majestic areas. One is Mount Fuji, another is Mount Kilimanjaro, and there’s also the Mariana Trench and Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. I’m spoiled and lucky to have traveled to a lot of these places — but not all of them yet. And now that I’m older, I realize it probably influenced me to do a lot of that stuff. When I was a kid, I identified those things on a map and discovered places. I was fascinated by it as an object. And it’s still there on my shelf.

I really cook a lot on the weekends. During my workweek, I’m at the restaurants and I’m recipe testing; we’re doing this, we’re doing that. I’m never cooking in my apartment ever. But on the weekends, I like to cook fish, and I’ve had these pliers for some time. They work really well for removing bones. It’s very simple with this little spring. I would say the western and American versions of these look like the pliers you’d have in your tool cabinet, which also work in a pinch if they don’t have any oil on them. But with these, the bones come out really easily, the way they just pinch the pinbone without snapping it, which gets annoying very quickly. The angled tip helps pull out a submerged bone without ripping the flesh.

There’s always one of these sticking out of a little ceramic catchall that’s next to the stove. There’s always one there. You could buy it at Buon’Italia; I’m sure Eataly has it, any good Italian supermarket will have it. It’s wild oregano that is air dried, and it usually comes from Sicily or Calabria or Basilicata. I use it extensively at the Italian restaurants. It’s on a bunch of recipes at Locanda Verde and Bar Primi. Sometimes, from my garden we’ll dry our own oregano, and that’s fine and tastes good, but there’s something about the southern Italian variety that has this wonderful floral quality to it. And drying on the branch seems to preserve some of those volatile oils more. You keep it on the branch, so it kind of looks like a flower arrangement, and then you pick up the branch and put it over your pasta or whatever it is, and shake it a little bit so the oregano falls off, and it’s just a nice touch.