NEW YORK (AP) — Bobby Flay's latest cookbook is really a sort of recipe for how Bobby Flay was made.
The chef, restaurateur and TV personality has compiled 100 of his most important dishes into a lush, beautifully photographed coffee table book he hopes will inspire home cooks.
“This is certainly my most important book to me and I think is going to be my most important book to people who consider themselves my readers,” Flay says.
“Bobby Flay: Chapter One: Iconic Recipes and Inspirations from a Groundbreaking American Chef,” has dishes from his restaurants like Mesa Grill, Bolo, Bar Americain and Gato, and his epic runs on “Iron Chef.”
“Interestingly enough, when I was going through the database of all these thousands of recipes, they popped out at me immediately,” he says.
Three dishes from Mesa Grill that stayed on its menu from the time the restaurant opened in 1991 to when it closed 26 years later — including Shrimp and Roasted Garlic Tamale — made the book. As did Steamed Baby Clams with Saffron-Tomato Broth and Scallion Croutons from Bolo and an “Iron Chef” stunner — Curried Fried Chicken with Charred Lime.
The book is broken up into just three sections — seafood, meat and vegetables — with Flay avoiding making a chronology of dishes for fear of confusing readers. All have been updated to reflect today's ingredients and techniques.
“What I want people to do is, even though it’s this beautiful sort of coffee table book, I do want them to use it either by cooking from it directly or being inspired by it,” he says.
“So when somebody says, ‘I want to cook fish tonight, I got that Bobby Flay cookbook, let me open to the fish section’ — that’s going to inspire them.”
Most illuminating are the eight essays Flay wrote that describe a career that has won four Daytime Emmys, multiple James Beard Awards and the honor of cooking a state dinner for President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Readers will learn that Flay struggled at school — although smart, he had a learning disability — and a turning point came when he was a temporary busboy leaving his last shift at the restaurant Joe Allen and the chef asked if he wanted a job in the kitchen.
"I didn’t know that I wanted to cook for a living. I was 17 years old or something. I was just like, 'Well, I don’t have anything to do today. I don’t know where my friends are, so fine. Like, where do I find an apron?’”
Flay, soon turning 60, learned he had to work with his hands to be inspired and food unlocked something in him. It is, he says, how he shares his love.
“I remember waking up one morning a handful of months after I started working, laying in bed, staring at the ceiling. And I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to go to work today,’” he recalls. “I never felt that feeling before.”
Flay hit the ground running, soon working for Jonathan Waxman at Bud's, reborn as a red-headed Irish-American New Yorker loving the food of Southwest and Mexico. As he traveled his repertoire grew — Spanish, Italian and French.
“I am always thrilled to see somebody cooking something interesting. I get inspired by it,” he says. “Let’s face it: We’re watching what everybody else is doing. I mean, you can’t just sit in a room and just come up with a brand new cuisine.”
Flay also became a Food Network star, hosting such shows as “Grillin’ & Chillin’” and “Boy Meets Grill” and competition shows like “Bobby’s Triple Threat” and “Beat Bobby Flay,” which has a new holiday-themed series this year featuring Marcus Samuelsson, Eric Adjepong and Brooke Williamson.
Not all his food became iconic, like his liberal use of Calabrian chilies. When he opened Bolo, he created what he believed would be its signature dish — a paella with duck and lobster. His staff weren't so sure, but he insisted. The New York Times critic would later rave about Bolo but said of the paella that the lobster "looks as if it fell into the dish and wonders how it is ever going to get out.”
Flay credits many people for his success, saying food is a collaborative field. Take his Lamb Shank with Toasted Orzo, Roasted Garlic and Oven-Dried Tomato. He says chef Tom Valenti was one of the first to serve lamb shanks in the city and Flay's twist was to add orzo, making a comforting winter dish. A food writer later offered a tip: toast the orzo in a dry pan to give it a nutty flavor.
“I did it and it worked and it was amazing and people loved it,” he says. “The food world is a wonderful place because it’s helmed by people who are generous with their thoughts and their experience.”
He loves the camaraderie of the kitchen and the challenge and is tired of hearing negativity about the restaurant business. “Listen, it gave somebody like me a life, forget about a career,” he says.
“You’ll see on shows like ‘The Bear’ and stuff like that that it’s not so much about how much gratification the customer gets. It’s more about the battle and the challenge to get through the evening and work alongside people and get something good on the plate.”
This image released by The Food Network shows Bobby Flay, left, and Michael Symon during an episode of the cooking series "Beat Bobby Flay: Holiday Throwdown." (Stephen Davis Phillips/Food Network via AP)
This cover image released by Clarkson Potter shows "Bobby Flay: Chapter One: Iconic Recipes and Inspirations from a Groundbreaking American Chef." (Clarkson Potter via AP)
This image released by The Food Network shows Bobby Flay during an episode of the cooking series "Beat Bobby Flay: Holiday Throwdown." (Stephen Davis Phillips/Food Network via AP)
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A white Kansas police detective accused of sexually assaulting Black women and girls did not appear for his trial Monday, prompting authorities to issue an arrest warrant.
Roger Golubski, 71, failed to appear in federal court Monday as jury selection was about to begin. Craig Beam, a public affairs officer with the U.S. Marshal’s Service, confirmed that an arrest warrant has been issued.
Golubski faces six felony counts of violating women’s civil rights. Prosecutors say Golubski demanded sexual favors from female residents of poor neighborhoods and would sometimes threaten to jail their relatives if they turned him down.
When Golubski failed to show up in court on Monday, his attorney, Christopher Joseph, said his client “was despondent about the media coverage.” He did not elaborate.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A white Kansas police detective accused of sexually assaulting Black women and girls and terrorizing those who tried to fight back is about to go on federal trial, part of a tangle of cases tied to decades of alleged abuse.
Prosecutors say female residents of poor neighborhoods in Kansas City, Kansas, feared that if they crossed paths with Roger Golubski, he'd demand sexual favors and threaten to harm or jail their relatives. He is charged with six felony counts of violating women's civil rights, and jury selection in his trial is set to begin Monday in a federal courthouse in Topeka.
The case has outraged the community and deepened the historical distrust of law enforcement. “Our emotions are everywhere," said Laquanda Jacobs, herself freed from prison through the work of the Midwest Innocence Project, as she waited in Kansas City, Kansas, to board a Topeka-bound bus with other advocates.
The prosecution follows earlier reports of similar abuse allegations across the country where hundreds of officers have lost their badges after allegations of sexual assaults.
Golubski, now 71, is accused of sexually assaulting one woman starting when she was barely a teenager and another after her sons were arrested. If a jury convicts him, he could die in prison.
About 50 people rallied outside the federal courthouse Monday morning in freezing temperatures to show their support for women who’ve said they were victimized by Golubski. They held signs that said, “Justice now!”
The trial is the latest in a string of lawsuits and criminal allegations that has led the county prosecutor’s office to begin a $1.7 million effort to reexamine cases Golubski worked on during his 35 years on the force. One double murder case Golubski investigated already has resulted in an exoneration, and an organization run by rapper Jay-Z is suing to obtain police records.
Golubski has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney has said that lawsuits over the allegations are an “inspiration for fabrication” by his accusers. But prosecutors said that, along with the two women whose accounts are the heart of the criminal case, seven others will testify that Golubski abused or harassed them.
“Every time I turn around, I’m looking," said Jermeka Hobbs, who has filed a separate lawsuit against Golubski and is not a witness in the trial. Her lawsuit says she was groomed to be one of “Golubski’s girls” and submitted to sexual advances fearing that he would bust her for drugs. “I’m thinking somebody is after me. I have no peace at all."
Fellow officers once revered Golubski for his ability to clear cases, and he rose to the rank of captain in Kansas City, Kansas, before retiring there in 2010 and then working on a suburban police force for six more years. His former partner served a stint as police chief.
Golubski now looks nothing like the influential officer he was. He is under house arrest and undergoing kidney dialysis treatments three times a week. That will limit his trial to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
His attorney, Chris Joseph, said in a statement that some of the allegations against Golubski are 20 to 30 years old, adding, “In public filings, the prosecution has acknowledged that the verdict will turn entirely on the accusers’ credibility.”
But Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion, a New Jersey nonprofit working to free innocent people, described Golubski in a court hearing as the “dirtiest cop I’ve ever encountered.”
Stories about Golubski remained just whispers in the neighborhoods near Kansas City's former cattle stockyards partly because of the extreme poverty of a place where some homes are boarded up. One neighborhood where Golubski worked is part of Kansas' second-poorest zip code.
Crime was abundant there, as were drug dealers and prostitutes, said Max Seifert, a former Kansas City, Kansas, police officer who graduated from the police academy with Golubski in 1975.
Seifert said police misconduct was tolerated in the department. He described how informants and Golubski’s ex-wife complained that Golubski was soliciting prostitutes. Golubski also was caught having sex with a woman in his office, he said.
“It’s kind of like a boys will be boys type thing,” said Seifert, who was forced into early retirement for refusing to conceal a motorist’s beating by a federal agent in 2003.
McCloskey said in an interview that Golubski had women "at his mercy.”
The inquiry into Golubski stems from the case of Lamonte McIntyre, who started writing to McCloskey’s nonprofit nearly two decades ago.
McIntyre was just 17 in 1994 when he was arrested and charged in connection with a double homicide, within hours of the crimes. He had an alibi; no physical evidence linked him to the killings; and an eyewitness believed the killer was an underling of a local drug dealer. Golubski and the dealer have since been charged in a separate federal case of running a violent sex trafficking operation.
The eyewitness only testified that McIntyre was the killer after Golubski and a now disbarred attorney threatened to take her children away, she alleged in a lawsuit.
McIntyre's mother said in a 2014 affidavit that she wonders whether her refusal to grant regular sexual favors to Golubski prompted him to retaliate against her son.
“She, like many people in the community, just viewed the police as all-powerful,” said Cheryl Pilate, an attorney who helped free McIntyre in 2017.
In 2022, the local government agreed to pay $12.5 million to McIntyre and his mother to settle a lawsuit after a deposition in which Golubski invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent 555 times. The state also paid McIntyre $1.5 million.
“That was the thread that gave people some courage,” said Lindsay Runnels, who serves on the board of the Midwest Innocence Project.
Prosecutors say Golubski drove one of the women at the center of their criminal case to a cemetery and told her to find a spot to dig her own grave. He sexually assaulted her repeatedly, starting when she was just in middle school, leading her to suffer a miscarriage, court filings say.
Once, prosecutors say, he forced her to crawl on the ground with a dog leash around her neck in a remote spot near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. With no one around, he is accused of chanting, “Down by the river, said a hank a pank; Where they won’t find her until she stank."
Golubski introduced himself to Ophelia Williams, the other woman at the center of the case, by complimenting her legs and nightgown as police searched her home, prosecutors said.
Williams was terrified at the time because her 14-year-old twins had just been arrested in a double homicide. They ultimately admitted to the crime so police would free their 13-year-old brother, Williams said in a separate lawsuit.
Golubski began sexually assaulting her, alternating between threatening her and claiming he could help her sons, according to court records in the criminal case. The twins are now 40 and remain behind bars. The lawsuit she is part of questions their confessions.
The Associated Press generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault, but Williams has told her story publicly.
Williams said in her lawsuit that she once mentioned making a complaint. She claims Golubski told her: “Report me to who, the police? I am the police."
Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.
FILE - Former Kansas City, Kansas, police detective Roger Golubski testifies, Oct. 24, 2022, at the Wyandotte County courthouse in Kansas City, Kan. (Emily Curiel/The Kansas City Star via AP)
