Celebrity chef, cookbook author and Monsignor

As pastor at Our Lady of Mount Carmel – Annunciation Parish, Williamsburg, a chaplain to the New York City fire department and chairman of Emmaus Centre, a Catholic arts organisation, Jamie Gigantiello is one Monsignor with a whole lot on his plate.

Apr 22, 2023

As pastor at Our Lady of Mount Carmel – Annunciation Parish, Williamsburg, a chaplain to the New York City fire department and chairman of Emmaus Centre, a Catholic arts organisation, Jamie Gigantiello is one Monsignor with a whole lot on his plate.

And when he’s not feeding his flock spiritually, he’s whipping up a heavenly pasta primavera and regularly hosting friends at his Williamsburg home.

But for Gigantiello, cooking is no mere holy hobby. Before answering a call to the Church decades ago, the 59-year-old graduated from the country’s top cooking school.

He then toiled in the kitchens and dining rooms of some of New York’s most elite restaurants and hotels, where he brushed up against Hollywood royalty like Jimmy Cagney and Paul Newman.

Today, he hosts a popular cooking show and has written a new cookbook, Breaking Bread. And now, the clergy member is adding “cookbook author” to his already impressive resume.

“The dinner table, and food, has always been a source of unity. These are life’s most important ingredients: faith, family, friends and food. That’s what I want to stress in my ministry as a priest.”

It’s in that spirit he’s written Breaking Bread, a charity cookbook out now from Emmaus Press.

Featured in its pages are the Msgr’s personal recipes — apple-ricotta pancakes being one of his favourites — as well as famed dishes from around New York City.

The idea for the book came from the many people who have asked for recipes after seeing Gigantiello’s handiwork on his cooking show of the same name, which airs on both YouTube and Net TV, the local Catholic television station.

“They were revamping the channel, because all you used to see were praying hands, and asked me if I’d be willing to do a cooking show where I’d visit different parishes and the people in them,” Gigantiello said of the show’s origins.

For Gigantiello, the love of cooking came early. Growing up in Long Island City, he has vivid memories of life revolving around Italian food.

“My mother cooked, my father cooked and we liked to eat,” he said.

In high school, he got a job with a caterer who lived across the street — and the gig led to him attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

After graduation, he joined the kitchen team at the Carlyle, ultimately working at the iconic Upper East Side hotel for four years in the early 1980s.

“One night they asked if I could help in the dining room, and from there I went from the back of the house to the front of the Café Carlyle,” he said. “I guess my serving was better than my cooking skills.”

Following another job as a restaurant manager and maître d’ at the InterContinental, the Msgr’s other interest — the Church — eventually won out. He officially traded pots and pans for pastoral life upon entering the seminary in 1990.

“I always had a call to the priesthood. I was an altar server and very close to the Church, but I never thought I would be able to be a priest because I was shy. Throughout my teenage years I was active and I felt I was being called to a vocation to priesthood, and people encouraged me. When I was 30, I felt the calling more passionately and pursued the priesthood,” said the monsignor.

“People think cooking is complicated and it’s not. Not my recipes. They are simple and are not time-consuming, and they can be prepared ahead of time and when your family is far apart you can create a family with friends and break bread. I have a unique ability to open a fridge, see what’s there and create something. But mostly I enjoy bringing people together.

“Family meals are important because people don’t sit down together as a family. In life, gathering around the table becomes a time to get to know each other and teach and share love and learn family values at the meal.

“Today, many parents have no clue what is happening in the lives of their families and that’s what the table brings together. We need to reclaim the family table,” added the monsignor. — New York Post/Aleteia