Top Chef Winner Ilan Hall to Open Gorbles
September 10, 2008 by Tracey Thompson
Filed under Recipes
Top Chef Season 2 winner Ilan Hall is looking at opening his own restaurant, Gorbles in downtown Los Angeles. Hall has been spending a lot of time on the move traveling to Spain, Romania, Israel, Venezuela and England presumably eating and learning. His father-who taught him to cook- is Scottish and his mother is Israeli, hence…Gorbles. Gorbles is an area of Scotland his father is from. The food he will serve he referred to as “Jewish food date-raped by bacon”. This means matzo balls wrapped in bacon.
According to Hall he has a sous chef, general manager and the all important menu. Just one small technicality…no space. He is looking around the art district in downtown LA. He feels that the area is emerging and being revitalized and sees this as an opportunity. He believes that he will have is opened by New Year’s of this year…I find that hard to fathom.
Ilan Hall has a lot of controversy swirling around him as well. According to published reports, he was in the midst of working out a deal to become the executive chef for Pase, a Spanish inspired eatery and lounge in Chelsea. The deal was allegedly between him and restaurateur J.E. Englebert and needless to say he has made a few enemies. The story is a he said-he said mess. I read it as Englebert initially wanted Hall, but then possibly dabbled with the idea of using another chef…annoying Hall’s sensibilities, he in-turn took off for LA acted like the incident was never close to becoming a reality and left Englebert scrambling for a well-known chef to open his new venture by December.
Englebert told Page Six:
”Hall and I exchanged numerous e-mails and traded phone calls. He agreed to be the executive chef for which he would get a weekly salary and points in the place in return for a nominal investment. I thought we had a done deal – the food sections of New York magazine and Time Out New York even ran stories.”
Hall may have seen this as a possibly stifling venture and longed to open things his way. Sadly, I think that he is naive to think that he can just up and do it. It is rare for even the best chefs to have success as experienced by previous winner Harold Dieterle.
Hopefully, Hall has truly come to enjoy LA, because something tells me NYC won’t be coming to call.
I wouldn’t eat in Ilan Hall’s restaurant if you paid me. The guy is an a**hole, a bully and a sneak who spent most of his run on Top Chef being offensive and dreaming up ways of getting his chief competition, Marcel Vigneron, either disqualified or rattled.
He stole the win by insinuating – again – that his opponent cheated and had no people skills to run a kitchen. Well, if making others do your dirty work for you is “people skills” I for one am glad I don’t have any.
Ilan’s food never looked that great either — granted I didn’t get to taste it — and was less than imaginative, so no, when I’m in LA, I’ll give Gorgles (!) a miss.
I hope he goes back to being a line chef, that’s all he deserves.