Rocco Returns

The TV “personality” is back in the kitchen at the Meatpacking District’s Standard Grill.

- Adam Platt

Like most talented athletes or artists, great chefs tend to have careers with many stages, though the multiple chapters and side notes that make up the Rocco DiSpirito story have been more jumbled and dramatic than most. There were the long-ago prodigy years at forgotten ’90s-era establishments like Annabelle, Dava, and, finally, the superb seafood restaurant Union Pacific, which vaulted the boyish wunderkind from Queens into the stratosphere of that chef-centric era. There was the dispiriting early celebrity phase of the Rocco story, in which our hero is lured away from the kitchen by crackpot reality-TV schemes (NBC’s grimly watchable The Restaurant), the incessant siren song of a thousand dimwit money jobs (Bertolli frozen foods, anyone?), followed by the descent into a whirlpool of C-list projects (Dancing With the Stars, Rocco Gets Real, the QVC gig) that caused even his most fervent fans to write Rocco off for good.