Rockville Centre chef leads charge against cancer

After a lifetime of traveling and cooking, Ritz-Carlton Executive Chef Vincent Russo returned to New York and his hometown of Rockville Centre this week, to promote the first ever city-wide chef-driven event to benefit the Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s New Orleans affiliate.

Russo, who grew up in the village and graduated from South Side High School in 1989, developed the program “NOLA Goes Pink,” in which restaurants in the Big Easy will provide special prix fixe menus to support breast cancer awareness and research. He said he hopes that the idea will spread to New York and throughout the nation. Russo and other executive chefs appeared on The Today Show to discuss their charity events on Wednesday.

A desire to travel has kept Russo from his hometown for some time. Though he has worked as a chef everywhere from The Palms Resorts in Turk and Caicios to the St. Thomas Ritz-Carlton to the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego to the Drake in New York, he said he remains excited to return home.

“I still have a lot of friends on Long Island and I’m looking forward to coming back up there,” Russo said. “It might sound corny, but I’m going back home.”

As a chef, Russo specializes in preparing seafood, an ability he attributes to where he grew up, although his first job in Rockville Centre was as a pizza maker at the age of 16.

When he does return, Russo said he is sure that one restaurant he will visit will be Bigelow’s, Rockville Centre’s famous clam shack. When he was younger, according to Bigelow’s co-owner Anthony Andreolas, Russo was a regular at the restaurant that is near the intersection of North Long Beach Road and Sunrise Highway.

“I would see him at least every Friday or Saturday,” said Andreolas, a friend of Russo’s. “He would always be telling me about how he was going to travel, and he would always talk about concerts he went to, like the Grateful Dead.”

Andreolas recalled that Russo’s favorite meal to order was Bigelow’s famous Ipswich Clams, though “sometimes he would come in to grab a burger.”

The two had only recently renewed their relationship while Andreolas was on his honeymoon nearly a year a go. “My wife and I went down to St. Thomas at the Ritz and I saw these chefs having a meeting,” Andreolas said. “I went to check it out and I saw him and we recognized each other immediately.”

Russo said he believes that the restaurants in New York City and on Long Island could benefit from a program like NOLA Goes Pink, because October is sometimes a slower time for customers and it could attract more people.

Russo developed the idea for the month long program when he realized that New Orleans restaurants did not offer a lot of healthy dining alternatives. After a close friend from home, who had endured a double mastectomy, asked him for healthy cooking tips, Russo began researching “super foods,” which are low in calories and high in nutrients, and other healthy anti-carcinogen options.

Many of the restaurants Russo reached out to expressed interest to participate in the program and will donate 10 percent of their profits during the month of October to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.