Harold Dieterle of 'Top Chef' took cooking lessons to meet girls

"Top Chef" winner Harold Dieterle’s first formal cooking lessons were in a home economics classroom at West Babylon Junior High School.

Today, Dieterle admits he didn’t take the class to learn how to cook. He did it to meet girls.

“I may have been ahead of my time,” Dieterle said, laughing. “While all the boys were hanging out together, taking shop class, working with all guys, I was with the girls. I wasn’t really a ladies man, but I sure wanted to be.”

Dieterle, 37, was the first winner of the hit Bravo television cooking competition "Top Chef," which first aired in 2006. Since then, Dieterle has opened up two restaurants -- Perilla, which serves contemporary American cuisine in the West Village, and Kin Shop, also in Manhattan, which focuses on contemporary Thai dishes.

Growing up in a Sicilian household on 4th Street and Little East Neck Road in West Babylon, Dieterle was surrounded by food. He remembers Sundays spent preparing dinner as early as 2 or 3 in the afternoon, with his mother and aunts crowded in the kitchen, cooking up traditional Italian meals.

“We would have big barbecues in the summers, and we would run out and pick blueberries from a bush in our backyard, too,” Dieterle said. “We’d freeze them, and have them to eat all year round.”

But it was that time learning how to cook in school that prompted the West Babylon native to pursue cooking professionally. In his junior and senior year of high school, Dieterle split his time between formal classes at West Babylon High School, and cooking classes at Wilson Tech’s culinary programs, offered through BOCES.

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“Once I got to high school, I was eating, sleeping, breathing, cooking,” Dieterle said. “It was the only thing that really kept me focused, more than any of my classes at least.”

One of Dieterle’s first real cooking experiences was when he was 17 years old. His parents gave him permission to cater his younger sister Jennifer’s Sweet 16 -- an ambitious project that Dieterle immediately accepted. Cooking out of his home, Dieterle attempted to create a bolognese, but ended up burning the bottom and making a mess out of the kitchen.

“It didn’t go well,” Dieterle said. “My parents had to go out and buy all new ingredients and I had to do it again. My mom had a close eye on me for the rest of the night.”

After graduating high school, Dieterle went to to study cooking at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. He eventually ended up working at The Harrison, a hotel in downtown Manhattan, where he remained until his "Top Chef" stint in 2005. He now lives in New York City with his wife Meredith.

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Dieterle released his first cookbook, titled “Harold Dieterle’s Kitchen Notebook,” earlier this year and will be in Long Island as part of his book signing tour this Saturday. His first stop will be at the Barnes and Noble location in Bay Shore at 2 p.m., and then he will be at the Book Revue in Huntington in the evening, at 7.