For a select few chefs, winning a TV cooking competition is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For Richard Ruskell, it’s becoming a regular thing.
The executive pastry chef at the Montage Beverly Hills recently won the “Food Network Challenge,” a grueling eight-hour competition, for the fifth time. But Ruskell, who has appeared on the hourlong show 11 times in the past four years, didn’t exactly dominate at the outset.
“I pretty much fell flat on my face for the first few (episodes), but then I got better,” he said.
His first four victories came in cake-decorating competitions, in which Ruskell favors Disney characters. But he won the last one for his unusual cookie concoctions.
Ruskell baked a variety of Asian-themed cookies – featuring green tea and other ingredients – that were hits with the judges. They were so good, in fact, that Ruskell will start selling them at the Montage in the fall.
With all of his television gigs, Ruskell, 53, said he is starting to get recognized in public. Would he like to have his own TV show someday?
“Oh, sure,” he said, “I think it’d be fun.”
Canyon Climbers
Call it extreme hiking.
The 23-mile “rim-to-rim” trail in the Grand Canyon is so grueling the National Park Service has posted signs warning hikers not to attempt the hike in one day, complete with a photo of a Boston Marathon champion who died trying to do so.
Nonetheless, for the past two Labor Day holidays, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President David Rattray and his wife, Terry, have traversed the trail, hiking down 5,000 feet from the South Rim, braving 100-degree-plus temperatures at the bottom and climbing 6,000 feet to the higher North Rim – in one day.
For the Rattrays, who are both in their early 50s, this tradition started on a previous trip to the Grand Canyon when the couple encountered some rim-to-rim hikers.
“It sounded really impressive,” David Rattray said.
After extensive conditioning and some coaching, the couple started their first rim-to-rim hike two years ago.
“The last part of the climb back up was the hardest because we were so exhausted and the temperature was still in the 90s,” he said.
That first hike took almost 15 hours, but the views were so spectacular that the Rattrays marked their calendar for a repeat on Labor Day 2009. The second hike took just over 12 hours, even though the temperature hit 105 degrees at the bottom.
This Labor Day weekend, Ron Gastelum, of counsel to local engineering company Cordoba Corp. and a former chamber chief executive, plans to join the couple.
“I’ve been to the Grand Canyon once, but didn’t hike down to the bottom,” Gastelum said. “That’s one of the things on my bucket list.”
Gastelum said he was also going on a weeklong hiking trip in the Sierras in late August. “That should be enough conditioning for the rim-to-rim hike. At least I hope it is.”
Staff reporters Richard Clough and Howard Fine contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].
