Angelo Sosa to MCC Students: 'Find Your Passion'

Celebrity can be hard work.

It is, anyway, if you are reality TV celebrity chef Angelo Sosa.

Sosa, who appeared twice as a contestant on Bravo’s hit show Top Chef, can hardly walk down the streets of Manhattan without being recognized these days. And Monday, when he returned to his alma mater cooking school in Manchester, he got an appropriately enthusiastic reception.

Then, as seems to be part of Sosa’s recipe for success, he worked his butt off in the kitchen.

Sosa had been invited to Manchester Community College to attend a fund-raiser dinner for the school’s Hospitality Department and, in particular, its competition cooking team.  He spoke – a little nervously, perhaps -- to several groups of students, faculty and foundation members; but spent hours in the kitchen with the culinary students, where he clearly was more comfortable.

“It worked exactly as I hoped it would,” said MCC Chef/instructor Carl Stafford, who arranged for Sosa’s visit. Stafford fitted the former student with his own MCC “Top Chef” jacket and sent him into the cooking labs to help students make dishes Sosa had prepared in his television appearances.

Sosa moved from student group to student group, demonstrating how to peel an artichoke, how to roast a banana or butcher a piece of beef.

Perhaps without realizing, he also demonstrated the kind of hustle required of a first-class chef. He was still at the stove moments before the start of the dinner in his honor. More importantly, the students got to witness first-hand the creativity that helps drive Sosa’s success and to glimpse the intensity he brings to his work.

Sosa attended MCC’s culinary program in the mid-90s; then, convinced he would like it, went on to the Culinary Institute of America where he not only excelled, but became a fellow.

“I was pretty ambitious when I was young… younger,” the 36-year-old corrected. It was not unusual for him to study and work until 3 a.m. there, he said; and his professional work life after graduation routinely was a 90-hour week.

Much of his early work was for Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who has four-star restaurants all over the world. Sosa described his mentor as having “a glow about him.”

Sosa’s aura is more of a white-hot fire.

 “When you work in this kind of environment, you give all of yourself. It is a beautiful thing,” he said.

Sosa grew up in Durham, and has traveled extensively, building global perspective on the world’s cuisines and inspiring him to master Asian flavors and cuisines.

He urged the MCC student cooks to find their own passion, as he did.

“As long as you believe in it, just go for it and don’t let people stand in your way,” he said. “Don’t let these worldly things hold you down.”

Of course his return to his old cooking school was not completely about giving advice and inspiration to student cooks. It also a chance to meet his former teachers and see how the school has changed.

Among others, Sosa got to reminisce with Chef Marc Hussey, coach of MCC’s competition cooking team. Hussey hired Sosa to work with him at the Harbor Park Restaurant in Middletown years ago; and introduced him to his first cooking competition. Sosa went on to compete while at the CIA and, obviously, on television.

Sosa said his two appearances on Top Chef demanded months of commitment and focus, and imposed an enormous amount of stress, he said. He was up against other top-ranked cooks and got to rub elbows with judges like Chef Tom Colicchio, who has a steakhouse at Foxwoods Casino.

Sosa’s experience on the show, where he was eliminated twice, “humbled me and made me a better person,” he said.

And while his celebrity has sometimes gotten him “mobbed” at Starbucks to sign autographs, it has also brought him many potential investors in his future culinary enterprises. His newest venture is a casual restaurant in Manhattan called Social Eatz, at 232 E. 53rd Street. Sosa has also got a cookbook in the works.

Sosa signed his last autograph, patiently posed for his last photo, and finished up his visit to MCC around 9 p.m., but expected to be back at work in New York the next day.

When you have a new restaurant business, he said, you have to keep at it.