Rye Chef Cooks Up 1,000 Meals Per Day

When Rye chef Richard Lipari makes his shopping list for the next few days so he can figure out what to cook up for his extended “family,” here’s what that list may look like:

• 200 pounds of fish, heavy on the salmon, snapper and trout
• 25 pounds of meat with lots of prime ribs of beef, pork loin and lamb chops
• 100 pounds of wheat and flour
• 80 to 100 dozen eggs, give or take a broken shell or ten.

Lipari obviously isn’t an ordinary chef, and his extended “family” is a discerning clientele that isn’t related by blood.

Lipari is the executive chef for the , one of America’s most upscale continuing care retirement communities with independent, assisted living, skilled nursing and short-term rehab.

He has to be at home with lots of different ranges to satisfy many different palates with varying dietary needs. He serves up more than 1,000 meals a day for a 421-member client base, dining in a variety of Osborn restaurants– from the Bistro, the Grill and the fine dining room for residents with at least another 200 meals in the staff cafeteria.

Those kind of numbers could evoke an image of Lipari frantically juggling all kinds of pots and pans, salt and pepper, recipes and menus. Instead he remains cool under fire, supervising a line staff of 20 chefs and veteran sous chef Susana Minton, while displaying an professional expertise that comes from spending more than a quarter-of-a-century in a wide variety of kitchens.

Lipari's first kitchen was in Floral Park, Queens, where he spent countless hours watching his parents (Matilda and Angelo) and grandparents stirring up Sicilian-accented dishes heavy on the gravy, red sauce, and Parmigiana cheese. He soon knew he wanted his life to revolve around food, with a knowledge that went beyond his roots.

First, he went West as a young man,  learning how to manage the front of the house as a maitre’d in California restaurants the Bottle Inn in  La Jolla and Stephano's in San Diego.

Next came the making of Lipari as a chef. He enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in New Hyde Park, graduating in 1975.

“As a young CIA graduate, you think you know everything you need to know about cooking, but you soon find out that it takes a lot more than knowing how to cook to run a kitchen,” he said. “And I wanted to learn how to really run a kitchen.”

One of his first meaningful jobs was sous chef for a catering firm called Incredible Edibles that specialized in kosher cooking.

Five years later, he moved on to the Greenwich Country Club for an extensive stint under executive chef Dennis Griswold who taught him how to plan and order enough food to feed an extensive, demanding clientele while managing a large, in-house kitchen staff.

Several years later, Lipari heard via the foodie grapevine that the Osborn was expanding and interviewing potential executive chefs.

As fate would have it, the Osborn’s Director of Food Services was Andrew Horn, a CIA grad who remembered Lipari from their student days and was impressed with how far he had come from their culinary institute time together. He hired Lipari, who has been on board since, almost 15 years now.

Lipari liked the area so much, he moved to Rye with his wife and family so he didn’t have a lengthy commute; forgetting about the clock while cooking up ideas for the food that goes into his extensive menus.

“I still love to cook Italian meals when I’m home, and my wife Mindy is also an excellent cook,” he said. “But I pride myself on being able to cook every style of meal for the most demanding palate. And, like everyone else who works at the Osborn, we love each and every resident, and I love to please them by catering to their varying culinary tastes.”

There is no typical cooking day for Lipari at the Osborn, but his regular hours run from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. He stays as long as necessary to cater to special parties or whatever other culinary needs may arise.

That still leaves him time for an occasional round of golf and the flexibility to attend his sons' athletic events: Andrew, a seventh grader in middle school likes soccer and Chris favors hockey at the high school.

“But mostly my life is about cooking, family and the Osborn, and I couldn’t be luckier to be doing what I love at a place that I love,” he said.