Junior Michael Osofsky's résumé includes an award-winning study of death row workers in Louisiana, the deputy chairmanship of the ASSU Undergraduate Senate—and expertise preparing pan-seared breast of duck.
Osofsky started cooking at age 10, when he asked his mother to buy Emeril’s New New Orleans Cooking at the mall. “I started playing around with a couple of recipes,” says the New Orleans native. “I made Asian ginger shrimp dumplings with a soy dipping sauce as an appetizer. For an entrée, I went with a black pepper-seared yellowfin tuna with a tortilla sauce and cilantro salsa, and a banana cream pie with caramel drizzlings for dessert,” he continues. “The dessert was my brother’s favorite.”
Impressed by their son’s interest, Osofsky’s parents took him to dinner at Emeril’s eponymous restaurant—and told the celebrated Louisiana chef of their son’s fascination with his cookbook. Emeril Lagasse invited Osofsky to see the kitchen the next Saturday. “I didn’t believe him,” Osofsky says, but he went anyway. “It was overwhelming. You have this energetic chef who is always yelling.”
Emeril invited him to return the next week—and the next. “I started to work as his apprentice. I worked side by side with him,” Osofsky says.
“I saw a sparkle in his eye,” Emeril explains. At the restaurant, Osofsky learned how to craft his signature style. “He would cook dishes for his family and transform what he learned to his own interpretation,” Emeril says. “He learned a new path in life—cooking—and how it is all about people.”
In 1999, Osofsky garnered Louisiana high school chef-of-the-year honors—and turned down Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts to attend Stanford. On the Farm, he has helped the head chef in Florence Moore create low-fat recipes, redesigned the menu for the Mexican-food eatery at Tresidder and cooked for his friends— including a meal of sunflower seed-crusted panéed chicken, roasted Yukon gold potatoes and bananas Foster for a freshman dormmate and his date.
“I want cooking to be part of my life, but not the central part,” says Osofsky, who is majoring in psychology and plans to go to graduate school. “Emeril told me to go get a full education.” As always, Osofsky listened.
—Nancy Farghalli, '97, MA '98
